Work Design and Measurement

Course Description

Work Design and Measurement provides tools and methods for evaluating current job processes and ergonomics and provides methods for improvement. The techniques are used for optimizing safety, increasing efficiency, and improving productivity.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, EIN is the Industrial Engineering prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 3 credits, offered spring, with MAC1105 as prerequisite. ⚠ The single term of offering is worth planning around.

Notice the order in the catalog description: safety first, then efficiency, then productivity. That ordering is the discipline's own correction of its history. Work measurement began as a way to extract more output from people, and it was used badly enough, often enough, that the field had to rebuild its methods around the worker rather than around the stopwatch. The modern version holds that a job designed around how a human body actually works is both safer and faster, and that the two goals stopped being in tension once anyone measured properly.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for this course. Its engineering technology lecture courses run at the standard 15 contact hours per credit — ETG2520 (Statics) and EGN3311 (Statics) are both live at 3 credits and 45 hours — while the C-suffixed courses in these prefixes run at 20 (ETD2320C at 4 credits and 80 hours; ETD2364C, ETS2542C and ETS3543C all at 3 and 60). This course is unsuffixed and lecture-based, and is priced at the lecture convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe methods engineering and its role in operations.
• Analyse an existing work process and document it.
• Construct process charts, flow diagrams, and operation charts.
• Apply motion study and the principles of motion economy.
• Identify non-value-adding activity in a process.
• Describe work measurement and its purposes.
• Conduct a time study and compute an observed time.
• Apply performance rating and describe its subjectivity.
• Apply allowances for fatigue, personal needs, and delay.
• Compute a standard time and state its basis.
• Describe predetermined motion time systems.
• Apply work sampling and interpret its results.
• Describe learning curves and their effect on standards.
• Describe ergonomics and the anatomy of work-related injury.
• Identify ergonomic risk factors in a workplace.
• Assess manual handling risk using an accepted method.
• Design a workstation to fit the range of people who will use it.
• Apply anthropometric data to design decisions.
• Describe cumulative trauma disorders and their prevention.
• Evaluate the safety consequences of a proposed process change.
• Justify a proposed improvement quantitatively.
• Describe lean principles and waste elimination.
• Present an improvement recommendation to a non-technical audience.
• Describe the ethical dimension of work measurement.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe simulation of work systems.
• Describe facility layout and material flow.
• Describe production planning and scheduling.
• Describe human factors in control and display design.
• Describe incentive systems and their effects.
• Describe Six Sigma methodology and its certification levels.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Methods engineering
• Process analysis and documentation
• Process and flow charting
• Motion study and motion economy
• Identifying non-value-adding activity
• Work measurement
• Time study technique
• Performance rating
• Allowances
• Standard time
• Predetermined motion time systems
• Work sampling
• Learning curves
• Ergonomics and injury
• Ergonomic risk factors
• Manual handling assessment
• Workstation design
• Anthropometric data
• Cumulative trauma disorders
• Safety consequences of process change
• Quantitative justification
• Lean principles and waste
• Presenting recommendations
• Ethics of work measurement

Optional Topics

• Simulation of work systems
• Facility layout and material flow
• Production planning and scheduling
• Human factors in displays and controls
• Incentive systems
• Six Sigma

Resources & Tools

• Your own calculator and a systematic solution format — given, find, assumptions, working, answer with units, sanity check. Adopting one format now is worth more than any single technique in these courses.
• ABET (abet.org) — free accreditation lookup; check which commission accredits your programme before assuming a licensure pathway.
• NCEES (ncees.org) — free information on the FE and PE examinations and state-by-state requirements; the FE reference handbook is free and is a superb formula reference for these courses.
• Florida Board of Professional Engineers (fbpe.org) — free; the authority on Florida licensure.
• Engineering Toolbox and NIST reference data — free property tables and unit conversions; verify anything critical against a primary source.
• Professional societies — ASME, IEEE, ASHRAE, IISE, and ASQ all offer inexpensive student membership, standards access, and local chapter meetings where employers recruit.
• Your programme's laboratory and your instructors — the equipment time is the part you cannot get elsewhere, and it is already paid for.
• Internships and co-op placements — the single strongest predictor of employment at graduation in this field. Start looking a year before you think you should.
• NIOSH (cdc.gov/niosh) — free; the NIOSH lifting equation and its ergonomic assessment tools are the standard references and are directly usable in coursework.
• OSHA ergonomics resources (osha.gov) — free industry-specific guidance on musculoskeletal hazards.
• IISE — Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (iise.org) — the professional body; inexpensive student membership.

Career Pathways

• Mechanical engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3027.
• Electrical and electronic engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3023.
• Industrial engineering technologist and technician — SOC 17-3026.
• Manufacturing and production engineering support — process improvement, tooling, and quality.
• Quality engineering and inspection — SOC 51-9061 at technician level, rising into quality engineering.
• Maintenance and reliability engineering — consistently in demand and under-applied for.
• Controls, automation, and systems integration — among the best paid technical work available without a four-year engineering degree.
• Utilities and power — a substantial Florida sector, with generation, transmission, and distribution employment plus storm restoration work.
• Aerospace, defence, and space — Florida's Space Coast is one of the densest concentrations of this work in the country; ⚠ many roles require U.S. citizenship and some a security clearance.
• Theme park and attraction engineering — a genuine and distinctive Florida employer of mechanical, controls, and maintenance engineering talent.
• Building systems, HVAC, and energy management — steady work with a strong Florida market.
• Continue to a bachelor's or a graduate degree — Daytona State's engineering technology bachelor's programmes are the direct route, and see the licensure note about what that degree does and does not qualify you for.
• Industrial engineer — SOC 17-2112, with a bachelor's degree.
• Continuous improvement and lean practitioner roles — frequently the fastest route into operations management.
• Safety and ergonomics specialist — a growing speciality with its own certifications.

Special Information

⚠⚠ Musculoskeletal injury is cumulative, and the job design causes it

• Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are among the largest categories of workplace injury, and they are produced by ordinary tasks performed repeatedly rather than by accidents.
• ⚠ The damaging exposures are unremarkable — repetition, force, awkward posture, static loading, vibration, and duration. No single instance hurts; the accumulation does.
• By the time a worker reports symptoms the exposure has usually been present for a long time, which is why the design is the intervention and the injury report is the failure.
• Fit the job to the person, not the person to the job. Training someone to lift correctly does not fix a task that requires a bad lift.
• ⚠ Design for the range of people who will do the work, not for an average that describes nobody. Anthropometric data exists precisely because designing for the mean excludes most of the workforce.
• Use an accepted assessment method rather than judgement alone — the NIOSH lifting equation and similar tools produce defensible numbers.
• Eliminate, then engineer, then administer, then protect. The hierarchy of controls applies here as anywhere: rotating people through a harmful task spreads the exposure rather than removing it.
• Ask the people doing the job. They know where the awkward reach is, and they will tell you if asked in a way that does not sound like an audit.
• Measure the improvement. A change justified by injury reduction should be verified by it.

⚠⚠ Time study is measurement of people — and how you do it determines whether it works

• Work measurement has a genuinely bad history, and workers know it. An analyst who arrives with a stopwatch and no explanation will get resistance, distorted performance, and useless data — and will deserve all three.
• Explain what you are doing and why, before you start. Studies conducted openly produce better data than studies conducted quietly, which is a practical argument as well as an ethical one.
• ⚠ Never study someone without their knowledge. Covert observation is unethical, frequently contractually prohibited, and destroys the trust the whole method depends on.
• Study the job, not the worker. The output is a standard for a task, not an assessment of an individual — and saying so plainly matters.
• ⚠ Performance rating is a judgement, and it is the weakest link in the method. Two analysts rating the same operator will differ; be honest about that uncertainty rather than presenting a standard time as a measurement.
• Set allowances honestly. A standard with no realistic allowance for fatigue, personal needs, and unavoidable delay is a standard nobody can meet all day, and it will be ignored or resented.
• Involve the operators in the improvement. The people doing the work usually know the better method already and have never been asked.
• ⚠ A standard that is used punitively stops being useful. Once workers believe measurement leads to discipline, the data becomes theatre — and the organisation loses the ability to measure anything.

⚠⚠ An engineering answer is a number, a unit, and a judgement about whether it is plausible

• A number without units is not an answer, and unit errors are the single most common source of catastrophic engineering mistakes — including ones that have destroyed spacecraft.
• Carry units through the calculation rather than adding them at the end. If the units do not come out right, the working is wrong, and this catches errors nothing else will.
• ⚠ Sanity-check every result. Ask whether the magnitude is plausible before writing it down — a beam deflecting three metres or a pump drawing a megawatt is telling you something, and the software will not.
• Estimate first, then calculate. An order-of-magnitude estimate made before the analysis is the cheapest error check available.
• Know your assumptions and state them. Every analysis rests on idealisations — rigid bodies, incompressible flow, linear elasticity — and the failures happen where an assumption stopped being true and nobody noticed.
• Significant figures are a claim about precision. Reporting eight digits from a measurement good to two is a misrepresentation, not thoroughness.
• ⚠ Software output is not verification. Analysis packages return confident, well-formatted answers to badly posed problems — you are responsible for the model, the inputs, and whether the result makes sense.
• Show the working. An answer nobody can check is not usable engineering, and in professional practice it is not acceptable.
• Say when you are unsure. Flagging a doubt is what a competent engineer does; concealing it is how failures propagate.

⚠ Engineering technology and professional engineering licensure in Florida

• Engineering practice is regulated in Florida under Chapter 471, Florida Statutes, through the Board of Professional Engineers and FBPE. Offering engineering services to the public and sealing engineering documents require a professional engineer licence.
• ⚠⚠ Engineering technology and engineering are different educational pathways, and the distinction matters for licensure. Licensure routes are built around programmes accredited by ABET, and ABET accredits engineering and engineering technology under separate commissions with different criteria.
• ⚠ A degree in engineering technology may not qualify a graduate for PE licensure on the same terms as an engineering degree, and in some states not at all. Requirements differ by state and they change.
• If professional licensure is your goal, establish the route before you enrol — ask FBPE directly, ask the programme what its graduates have actually done, and get the answer in writing. This is the same unrecoverable trap this repository records for allied health accreditation, and it is discovered just as late.
• The industry exemption matters in practice. A great deal of engineering work performed inside a manufacturing company does not require a licence, which is why many engineering technology graduates have full technical careers without one.
• Certification is a separate and useful route — NICET, ASQ, and manufacturer certifications are recognised by employers and do not depend on the degree's accreditation category.
• ⚠ Rule 11 applies. Licensure requirements, accreditation criteria, and reciprocity between states all change — verify with FBPE and NCEES rather than relying on this guide.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live in these prefixes, since Daytona State offers both associate-level and bachelor of science in engineering technology coursework in them.

EIN3314 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered spring only at Daytona State, with MAC1105 as prerequisite.