Labor Hour Estimation Method Based On Manufacturing Difficulty Coefficient Of Product

With the rapid development of economic globalization and scientific technology,the competition in business are intensifying. In addition to the raise of degree ofeducation by customers, their requirements are changing from quality and price topersonalized appearance and diversified function. Therefore, great changes haveoccurred in the modern manufacturing environment. Faced with the new environment,enterprises must reduce production costs and improve productivity to seek development.However, because of lacking accurate working hours results in long production cycle,high labor costs, delayed delivery and other issues, these reduce the companiescompetitiveness. Thus, accurate working hours is needed to standardize production,operation and management, as well as, to improve the response to the market. Thetraditional time quota formulating methods have practicability and high accuracy in themass production environment with single product type and highly repetitive work. Thecharacteristics of modern manufacturing environment are random production orders,various product categories, low repetitive work, and flexible production. These lead tothe traditional methods can not meet the business and customers’ requirement toestablish working hours for high efficiency and accuracy. So, it is a serious problem tomake labor hours in a low-cost and high-efficiency way.According to the characteristics of modern manufacturing environment, based onproduct database, this paper took manufacturing difficulty coefficient of product as itsresearch object, and put forward a new building labor hours method. This methodfollows the thoughts of whole-part and macroscopic-microcosmic, took themanufacturing difficulty coefficient of product as the criterion and used similar scienceand group decision theory to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the buildingworking hours. Firstly, through the analysis of the characteristics of modernmanufacturing environment and requirements to the labor hours, it came up with a newmethod to estimate working hours. Secondly, in order to ensure the efficiency andreduce the repetitive labor, it built a model to measure the product similarity. Thissimilar judgment focused on two parts of the product: its number of elements and itsfeatures. Thirdly, it defined the concept of manufacturing difficulty of product, gave itscalculation model. Considering the impact of product features in similar product level,which increased the accuracy of working hours. Fourthly, the relational model between manufacturing difficulty coefficient of product and labor hours was built. Its parameterwas estimated by the least square method, and accuracy by T value method. Finally, itsspecific operation process was illustrated.