Time and Motion Study

Time and motion study is a systematic method of analyzing how a worker performs a manual task, in order to eliminate wasted effort and establish an efficient standard way of doing the work, combining two originally separate techniques. The American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered time study in the 1880s and 1890s, using a stopwatch to measure how long each element of a task actually took as the basis of what he called scientific management. The engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth developed motion study separately in the 1910s, breaking a task down into its elementary hand and body movements and studying them, often with early motion-picture film, to redesign the task for fewer and less fatiguing movements; the two approaches were combined into the single discipline of time and motion study that became a founding technique of industrial engineering.