How many pattern makers do you require for making patterns for 14 styles a day? How many supervisors do you require for your sewing line of 45 machines?
Do you require separate vice-presidents for different business verticals for your company?
Should you be hiring people in anticipation to more business volumes expectations or hire after establishing a relationship with new buyer.
These seemingly simple but hard to determine questions have one thing in common, something to do with manpower requirement in your organization. Team StitchWorld, alongwith Prof. Prabir Jana, NIFT, Bob Vallander, Regional Director, Gerber Technology and Phil Harber, Consultant, Hoffman examine.
To calculate manpower requirment for skill based tasks, first calculate the work content, then decide on target and lastly, calculate manpower required to meet the target.
Calculating manpower requirement for middle and upper management level is comparatively complex and depends on whether the organization is system-driven or individual-driven.
Any apparel manufacturer is notoriously ‘busy’ in fire-fighting, and executives working late hours absolutely normal. Are we then understaffed or the staff is inefficient? Who decides? How to decide? This article tries to raise and to some extent investigate the logic behind manpower requirement.
A scientific approach towards manpower requirement calculation is not so difficult. First we have to calculate the work content (how much time any task takes), then decide on target (amount of such work to be done) and lastly, calculate manpower required to meet the target. Above logic is easier to implement in skill based tasks but difficult for managerial staffs. Skill based tasks like pattern making, spreading, cutting, sewing, packing, inspection, etc. can be quantified in terms of minutes, whereas the Managerial tasks like merchandising, quality assurance, etc. are jobs whose description cannot be quantified accurately in terms of time.
Measuring Requirement for Skill Based Tasks
Deciding on manpower requirement for sewing department is probably most simple and straightforward. The reason behind this is the nature of tasks involved in sewing. Sewing tasks are repetitive with very minimum cycle time, making it easier for industrial engineers to measure the cycle time, average out, add allowances and arrive at standard allowed minute. Based on the work content and target we can very easily calculate requirement of sewing workers.
Manpower requirement for cutting and finishing is comparatively difficult. The activities are non repetitive and having long cycle time, thus it is comparatively difficult to arrive at standard allowed time. Firstly in cutting room one single operator works on different types of tasks, and secondly, variance of work content of sequential tasks is very high. For example, spreading cycle time for a lay may be five to six times slower than cutting of same lay.
Manpower requirement in pattern making and sampling operation is again nonscientific and based on peer experience and past records. Like cutting, pattern making, grading, marker making, etc. are long cycle time tasks. How can we decide how much time should be allowed for making pattern for a style? Can pattern making activity be further divided into smaller elements, which can be measured in terms of minutes?
Pattern making and marking are fast becoming a computerized operation; by this process a pattern can be made between 35 min. to 60 min. of a simple fashioned shirt to complex shirt as claimed by most of the technology suppliers.
Unfortunately there are too many variables in the pressing and finishing. It is very cumbersome to express the finishing/pressing work content as a SAM value for the same job would vary considerably from style to style, and on a machine to machine also from process to process. This is why most companies have central pressing areas rather than final pressing being done in the sewing line and to rely on average production numbers rather than SAM.
A trouser can be pressed in 3 different ways at 3 different quality levels and the same holds true with shirts or blouses. In the casual pants and jeans, typical production, which is based on a 20 second pressing cycle, 1 operator working on 2 machines will yield approximately 1500 pair in 8 hours.
In another case of the newly developed system, which combines cuff pressing with final leg pressing, the system actually increases production of legging.
A measurement checker or quality inspector in finishing section should check how many pieces per hour? Can we measure the standard amount of time required to inspect one garment? These are some logical skill based tasks where decisions are taken. It is common perception that garments with more defects will consume more time than garments with less defects! But if you think hard, you still need to observe all sections of fabric or garment (in pre-defined sequence) even if there are no defects found.
Along with actual manpower requirement we also require to calculate the reserve capacity in each departments depending on the absenteeism, labour turnover, bottleneck nature of the operation and recruitment cycle time.
Manpower Requirement in Management Cadre
Calculating manpower requirement for middle and upper management level is comparatively complex and depends on whether the organization is system-driven or individual-driven.
Let’s take the example of merchandiser, considered as middle management staff. How many accounts or orders or styles one merchandiser can handle? We must first derive the job description of a merchandiser, from job description we have to categorize the tasks into generic types; individual activity and group activity; individual tasks may be like communication (by mail, telephone, etc.). Group activity may be meeting, discussion, explanation, etc. Activities can be further categorized into non-interference type and interference type. Making a specification sheet is a non-interference type while telephone communication is an interference type (as the line may be busy and wastage factor). Work can also be categorized as internal activity and third party dependent activity; getting lab-dip approval from buyer is a third party dependent activity but inspecting a sample in internal activity. Another important allowance to be factored is the “multi-tasking” allowance. Due to unwitting migration between several tasks and showing progress on as many active tasks result focus loss in individual task. But then the job content can also be defined as the number of styles a merchandiser can handle based on the quantum of job requirement for each activity in a style execution and also considering that few of the activities may have bottlenecks. The basic and repeat style may need few merchandiser whereas the fashioned item require many more and the same is true for the how big and important the client is.
Considering all the above factors calculating workload of a merchandiser is a cumbersome work, thus in a system-driven company (where job descriptions are more or less defined), executives are less burdened whereas in an owner-driven company (where job descriptions are not clearly defined), executives are overloaded.
Similarly calculating how many managers I require for my company? What should be the ratio between presidents to managers, and then managers to supervisors are rarely decided based on job definition. The usual process is to forecast revenues first and then estimate the size of the staff required to achieve this sales volume. Here, HR managers use several techniques.
Trend Analysis: Trend analysis means studying variation in your firm’s employment levels over the last few years. You might compute the number of employees in your firm at the end of each of the last five years, or perhaps the number in each sub-group (like sales, production, secretarial and administrative) at the end of each of those years. The purpose is to identify trends that might continue into the future. Trend analysis can provide an initial estimate, but employment levels rarely depend just on the passage of time. Other factors like changes in sales volume and productivity also affect staffing needs.
Ratio analysis: Another approach is the ratio analysis, which means making forecasts based on the ratio between – (1) some causal factor like sales volume, and (2) the number of employees required (for instance number of marketing people). For example, suppose one marketing person traditionally generates $ 5,00,000 in sales. If the revenue to marketing people ratio remains the same, you would require six new sales people next year (each of whom produces an extra $ 5,00,000) to produce an expected extra $ 3 million in sales.
The manpower calculation in management positions are often tweaked for cost saving measures. Instead of increasing manpower, additional (overburdening) responsibilities to higher positions are common in lieu of salary hike and/or perks. These practices often interfere social and network and ultimately cause burnouts. Ethical practices right from top to bottom are necessary to avoid exploitations at middle management level.
