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MTM. The correct method. If you follow the correct method you will meet our standards.
Our training floor lady takes the girls to a machine in the room which is setup exactly as they are
on the sewing floor and demonstrates by doing a very simple operation just how little time is spent in
maneuvering the work while the needle is moving as against the time spent getting ready to perform the
sewing cycle.
She explains to them all the many extraneous elements that must be done in standard time if produc-
tion is ever to be made. Thetrainee is made to real- ize that even tying and untying the bundle, writing on her work ticket, pasting and tearing of the work ticket, all take time and are all figured in the stand-
ard and all must be done quickly if standard is ever to be reached.
We convince trainees that since handling takes 60 percent of their time then we expect to see 60 per-
cent of standard earned the very first day they are on the floor. We do not count in any machine time. We figure that the 10 percent they usually earn on ma- chine time is lost in their not performing the entire
handling procedure at the proper pace. After all, trainees are still human.
The important point for management to realize is that if work is handled properly there will be more
time for sewing or whatever machine cycle you are working with. Since anywhere from 40% - 60% of
our jobs are handling times we are at least assured that trainees’ labor loss will not exceed the difference between those figures and 100 percent.
We begin with the simplest of operations. One pile of cloth on the left and one pile on the right. The
trainee is shown the proper method for reaching, grasping and moving the cloth to the table area.
Nothing else. We allow the trainee to practice the method for 15 minutes. Then we give them a stack
of 72 pieces (our bundles are six dozen), start the watch, while the training floorlady stands in back and
watches to see if the method is being followed. The same time is used as if this were a productive job on
the floor and we have had but a bare scraping of new employees to fail the first part of their training test.
If anyone fails to beat standard, it is usually caused by nervousness and a second or third try al-
ways ends in success. If subsequent tries are fail- ures we have spent but very little money to weed out
a sub-standard employee.
Now the floorlady stops and congratulates the girl for doing the operation just as fast as girls out
on the floor who have been here for years. The use of MTM standards insures a passing test grade.
The second operation consists of reaching to the cloth, grasping, moving to the table area in front of
the needle and aligning as in the first phase, but now we bring in the element of raising the pressure foot while the hands are in motion. This takes the same amount of time, but calls for a little more coordination.
We explainthat although they are doing more, we do not give them more time because the pressure
foot is raised while they are doing something else. You and I call it simultaneous motions. You see, we
are giving them an insight on MTM rate setting. Again the time is recorded to do a six dozen bundle
and again the operator is complimented. This must be done, for it gives the new employee a sense of
achievement and makes her wonder if sewing is as difficult as she thought it would be. But you and I
know that she’s still handling and actually not sewing a stitch.
The third test operation is an amplification of the first two. The work is brought tothe needle area,
positioned, the foot lowered, and the operator press- es down on the treadle as if she were going to tack,
but of course there is no power. A few tries and this can be performed very creditably and with lots of
finesse by the newest employees.
The last handling test is to perform the above operation, but after the make believe tack, slide the
hands to the ends of the cloth, realign, and press the pedal as if to sew the seam. Still with no power but
always timed and always with the trainees meeting or beating our standard. Earning production the very
first morning as it were. At least, that’s what we impress on the trainee. They are doing as well or
better than many of our girls who have been sewing since the plant opened. You see, everyone likes to
have a goal to shoot at and this applies especially to beginners. Just like golf. First you try to break a
hundred, then ninety, and then you buy a book on “How to Play Par Golf” and you go back to a hundred again.
While these tests are being run the floorlady points out to the trainee that every time we have added
something to her work, she had been given more time to perform the operation. This familiarizes them
with our rate setting procedure and makes them cog- nizant of the fact that we pay in minutes and not in
money.
If the trainee has passed the first section of the test she is considered a good prospect and allowed
to continue with the course. We have found that we can weed out about 12 percent of all applicants in the first three hours of employment and this is a much better arrangement than all the dexterity tests in the world. No wasted money with girls who can’t reach, pick up, and move. After all, that’s the basis of all our sewing and we have every right to insist that it be passed with flying colors.
Now is the time for sewing. The operator is taught the mechanics of the machine — stop, start,
handwheel turns, etc. But we don’t thread the ma- chine. No sense to worry them with something that
can be learned in a matter of minutes. Anyone who can handle work can be taught to thread a machine.
That comes last with us.
We give each trainee plenty of sheets of stiff brown paper. She is given instruction in handling
the paper while the machine is in motion and allowed about an hour to mess around — so to speak. The
floorlady corrects any bad habits while they are gaining machine confidence. This takes up the re-
mainder of the first day.
Money is paid out, no work turned in, but a trainee who is a good bet to make standard.
The second day starts with the handling tests again and then more practice with the brown paper.
Now comes the second part of the test. 72 pieces of this brown paper are placed in the work area and
the trainee reaches, grasps, picks up, moves, posi- tions, and sews down through the lines marked on
every piece. Your eyes would open if you could see just how well they mastered the machine. Although
they usually start out a little rough, they actually look like experienced sewers by the time they get
one-third through this test and towards the end they fairly fly with the handling.
Whoever passes this test, and about 90 percent always do, is taught how to thread the machine and
allowed to practice. ;
Now similar sheets of brown paper are given out with two vertical lines down the center a half inch
apart. The operator must pick up the paper, sew down through the lines, pull out the work from be-
hind the needle, reach for another, and so on. She is taught how to pull the work back across her table,
snip it properly, and stack and count.
We impress on them that all work must be counted. The first bundle they dohas about 68 pieces in it and we check to see how many they claim to have cut when they finish the bundle. If the thread breaks while they are sewing, naturally, they stop and rethread. We have already explained to them that sufficient time is given for thread breaks inallour studies. We also impress on them that they won’t make standard on this test unless they pullacross quickly, snip quickly, and stack quickly.
This ends the second day. Still money paid out and no work coming back in.
The third day we give them general instructions in doing the same maneuvers with cloth instead of
paper. Then they are sent to the sewing floor, after practicing cutting off work tickets, etc.
They approach the sewing floor with confidence. They have been taught and can perform every basic
handling motion we need to do our work. There is no reason why they won’t goon to make good sewers.
Now that we have them out on the sewing floor they are assigned to a permanent job and put into
training. How can we tell exactly how long it should take to make standard on each operation? Again we used MTM.
We went back to the analysis sheet and gave all the machine time elements three times their normal
time value. We added to this the actual handling time and plotted this on a curve. Again you see that we
consider handling time as something that anyone can master, but we admit that dexterity with machine
time is slow in coming.
The curve we use is the one which was taken from any standard book of industrial engineering. It
is the universal training curve for all learners. The horizontal measurement is in TMU’s and the vertical
measures the weeks.
It is very logical to assume that this figure will vary in different industries and I imagine that a
wealth of research time could be applied against this problem. We hit ours right on the head and are per-
fectly willing to accept it as Gospel. Our training curves substantiate our findings and since we have
over 400 completed curves in our files, it will take an awful lot of strong argument to dissuade us.
I can also tell you briefly that we believe that MTM can be used to grade sewing jobs as to com-
plexity. We are assigning so many points to each reach and move, somany more to each grasp and re-
grasp, so many to each simple position, and the largest amounts of points to the difficult positions.
The more points, the higher job grade the operation receives.
Perhaps I may be able totell you more about this at a later date. Again I would welcome correspond-
ence if any of you are on the same tack.
Since we had qualified trainees on the sewing floor, and knew just how long it should take to learn
the operation, we could easily set up a training schedule which would warn our new plant managers
if operators were not coming along at the correct learning rate. We used the identical training curve
and plotted weeks on the horizontal against minutes
on the vertical. Daily earnings were posted and the trainee could earn a production bonus if her earned
minutes at the end of the week were above what was considered normal for a trainee at her stage of the
training period. é
Turnover dropped sharply. We could weed out the weak sisters without waiting too many weeks,
could shift them to an easier job and watch their progress again, could accurately tell just about when
a section would get up to standard, and no longer had to rely on the flocrladies to judge the potential worth of a new machine operator. Either she was above the training line or she wasn’t. If she was, our labor loss was nothing to be frightened by. If she was be- low the curve, we dismissed her or transferred her to a less skilled job and saved all that salary that is usually put out during the decision period when you and the supervisors are deciding who stays and who goes.
Furthermore, the same system of trainee bonus pay is used for retraining the old operators on new
jobs. In this case, employees get only half the train- ing time and we have found that it works out perfectly. We don’t guarantee wages when we transfer operators to new jobs, don’t get excuses when we ask them to transfer, and don’t have the problem of make- up pay for an unfair period of retraining time. Each employee takes a special pride in the fact that she is earning above trainee standard.
Furthermore, we make it mandatory for the plant manager to notify each operator on Monday what her
goal in minutes or dozens is for that week. That gives them some definite goal to aim at from the
very first minute of work.
But teaching an old dog new tricks still is as difficult today as it was when the saying was inspired.
Resistance to change, a reluctance to try our method, call it anything you wish — is very strong in the
Southern country women. “Ah bin doin’ right well this a way and don’t reckon hit’s any sense to my
changin’ now,” is the answer you can expect to get from any of them. So we went back to hitting them
where it hurts the most — in their pocketbook. They can have their choice. 1. We will guarantee pay for
a specified period of weeks if they will go back in the training room and master the new method, or 2. We will put in the new rate which reflects the method change immediately and they can sweat it out them- selves. Failure to make production standards will result in a transfer to a lower grade job. We don’t put it to them so harshly but the end result means exactly what I said.
In order to show them just how much money they are missing by refusing to learn our new method we
prepared charts showing the value in money for each incorrectly performed motion, each extra foot motion, each regrasp, each hesitation, etc. These charts are nothing but the value of a TMU in each of our eight job grades. And the TMU’s run from 100 to ten million so that we can cover just about any extra amount of motions that we notice on the floor.
We shy away from mentioning the savings in money but make an effort to convert the money lost
into something tangible such as a ticket to the movie, ten pounds of chicken feed, a new plot point, and so on.
When you tell a woman in our town that just by
doing less work in the form of less motions that she
actually will earn more money — well, the psychol-
ogy is terrific. It’s a fabulous approach.
Training operators — either old or new — is the most important phase of our business. And we have
conclusively found that by teaching all the simplified motions until they can be performed in the regulation time that our training period has been reduced by over half. The acquisition of the basic handling skills in the training room enables the recruit to master the job quickly, in that she has already been keeping time with the tempo, rhythm and movements of experienced operators.
One of the more important aspects in training operators is reduction of turnover. When a newcomer
to industry is able to acquire mastery of her job in a relatively short time she will be able to settle down
to the business of earning the company money fairly easy. However, if it is going to take six months or
more (as many of our jobs used to) it is truism to expect turnover to stay high. The new employee at-
tempts to ease the pain of a lengthy training period by occasionally absenting herself and then — especially if the plateau period is long — she eventually leaves. We have an absentee record of 3 1/2 percent
for trainees and a turnover rate of almost nothing.
Our trainees don’t follow the industry old practice of learning slowly. We teach them how to do
everything fast right from the very first day. They have learned their job motion by motion. The stitch
by stitch comes on the sewing floor. When a trainee sees just how close she can come to making stand-
ard merely by working on the sewing cycle — it isn’t long before we have another qualified sewer.
The operator is happy, the floorlady is happy, the manager is happy, the top management group is
happy,
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