Industry:

Surface Coating of Aluminum profiles for Architectural, Automotive & Industrial Products.

In 2016 we had around 36 number of shopfloor labors in our department.

The process flow of the plant started with a labor intensive job of preparing batches of aluminum
profiles. After batch preparation the aluminum profiles went through the electrolytic process which was
mainly through cranes so had minimal manpower.

The shopfloor Labors were divided into 6 workstations and each workstation had about 6 team
members. There was one shift Incharge supervising all the teams. The Shift Incharge decided the target
number of batches depending upon the production priority and the available inventory of the raw
material. The raw material in our case was the extruded aluminum profiles which were to be coated.

During Quarter 1 of 2016, the operation director (OD) notified us about a sharp increase in booked
orders for surface coated Aluminum. The message was clear - we had to increase our production target
by a significant amount. Past experience suggested that we had the spare capacity but lacked the
manpower.

To solve the issue of manpower we started hiring contractual labor and added 2 labors in each teams.
The output was now 8 batches per team. We were pleased, but the OD wanted better output. Labor was
cheap therefore labor budget was not a constraint. Consequently we started increasing our teams.
Logically we felt the more we increase the team, the more should be the output. This is what we
observed and everything was working right for us. We were not letting the raw material inventory
buildup which was exactly what we wanted as the shelf life of uncoated aluminum is less than 4 days as
it corrodes easily. We had finally made teams of 12 members with average output of 20 batches per day
per team.

As we moved into Quarter 2 of 2016, due to a larger influx of orders we made the team size of 14 per
workstation. Theoretically we still had the spare capacity and the capacity of our bottleneck process was
way above the required target of total batches.

Naturally we were expecting the output per batch which was average of 20 for 12 members’ team to be
greater than 20. To our surprise, we found out that for the team size of 14 the actual production was
less than 16 batches per workstation. We assumed it to be an aberration of one day. But to our great
shock the production continued to be low throughout the week. The shift incharge was unable to
explain it.

OD immediately launched an enquiry. We had the following observations

1. With bigger teams, the responsibility of the output was spread among the team therefore each
member was not working as seriously or with the same commitment as before.
2. With so many workers on the shopfloor each worker was getting into way of another worker
which was leading to minor quarrels at work
 3. With larger teams the shopfloor was getting crowded, this was affecting the ergonomics of the
workplace. This in turn was compromising the safety of the team members. There were rise of
near miss accidents
4. The morale of a hardworking team member was affected if some of his fellow team member
worked at a slower pace. Gradually even hardworking employees start to work sluggishly. The
probability of this happening was higher in bigger teams

We came to the following conclusion

 Size of a team is very important factor which can affect productivity.

 Increasing team members doesn’t necessarily mean increase in output. There is a certain limit
over which the addition of member is unproductive. In economics this is termed as law of
diminishing returns.
 Increasing team members beyond the critical limit may even decrease the output to a
substantial extent
 For a manufacturing unit the team size is decided by nature of work, available shopfloor space,
manpower budget and past experience.