ms-05 mba assignment july dec 2010 Question 5

Q5) Write Short notes on the following:

          a) Waste Management.

          b) Work Measurement.

          c) Acceptance sampling.

Solution:

(a)Waste management

            Waste management is the collection, transport, processing, recycling or disposal of waste materials. The term usually relates to materials produced by human activity, and is generally undertaken to reduce their effect on health, aesthetics or amenity. Waste management is also carried out to reduce the materials' effect on the environment and to recover resources from them. Waste management can involve solid, liquid or gaseous substances, with different methods and fields of expertise for each.

            Waste management practices differ for developed and developing nations, for urban and rural areas, and for residential and industrial, producers. Management for non-hazardous residential and institutional waste in metropolitan areas is usually the responsibility of local government authorities, while management for non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste is usually the responsibility of the generator. Waste management methods for vary widely between areas for many reasons, including type of waste material, nearby land uses, and the area available.

            An example of waste management through composting is the Green Bin Program in Toronto, Canada, where household organic waste (such as kitchen scraps and plant cuttings) are collected in a dedicated container and then composted. The energy content of waste products can be recycled by using them as fuel. Recycling through thermal treatment ranges from using waste as a fuel source for cooking or heating, to fuel for boilers to generate steam and electricity in a turbine. Pyrolysis and gasification are two related forms of thermal treatment where waste materials are heated to high temperatures with limited oxygen availability. The process typically occurs in a sealed vessel under high pressure. Pyrolysis of solid waste converts the material into solid, liquid and gas products. The liquid and gas can be burnt to produce energy or refined into other products. The solid residue (char) can be further refined into products such as activated carbon. Gasification is used to convert organic materials directly into a synthetic gas (syngas) composed of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The gas is then burnt to produce electricity and steam.

(b)Work Measurement

            Work Measurement is a term which covers several different ways of finding out how long a job or part of a job should take to complete. It can be defined as the systematic determination, through the use of various techniques, of the amount of effective physical and mental work in terms of work units in a specified task. The work units usually are given in standard minutes or standard hours. Why should we need to know how long a job should take? The answer to this question lies in the importance of time in our everyday life. We need to know how long it should take to walk to the train station in the morning, one needs to schedule the day's work and even when to take out the dinner from the oven.

In the business world these standard times are needed for:

   1. Planning the work of a workforce,

   2. Manning jobs, to decide how many workers it would need to complete certain jobs,

   3. Scheduling the tasks allocated to people

   4. Costing the work for estimating contract prices and costing the labor content in

       general

   5. Calculating the efficiency or productivity of workers - and from this:

   6. Providing fair returns on possible incentive bonus payment schemes.

            On what are these standard times set? They are set, not on how long a certain individual would take to complete a task but on how long a trained, experienced worker would take to do the task at a defined level of pace or performance. Who sets these standard times? Specially trained and qualified observers set these times, using the most appropriate methods or techniques for the purpose i.e. "horses for courses”. How it is done depends on circumstances that obtain. The toolkit available to the comprehensively trained observer is described below. The reader is invited to search the individual methods on this current Website. Selecting the most appropriate methods of work measurement The method chosen for each individual situation to be measured depends on several factors which include:

   1. The length on the job to be measured in time units

   2. The precision which is appropriate for the type of work in terms of time units (i.e

       should it be in minutes, hundredths or thousandths of a minute)

   3. The general cycle-time of the work, i.e. does it take seconds, minutes or days to

       complete

            The length of time necessary for the completion of the range of jobs can vary from a few seconds in highly repetitive factory work to several weeks or months for large projects such as major shutdown maintenance work on an oil refinery. It is quite clear that using a stop-watch, for example, on the latter work would take several man-years to time to measure! Thus, more "overall" large-scale methods of timing must be employed. The precision is an important factor, too. This can vary from setting times of the order of "to the nearest thousandth of a minute" (e.g. short cycle factory work) to the other end of the scale of "to the nearest week" (e.g. for large project work). These are the dominant factors that affect the choice of method of measurement.

(c)Acceptance sampling

            Acceptance sampling uses statistical sampling to determine whether to accept or reject a production lot of material. It has been a common quality control technique used in industry and particularly the military for contracts and procurement Acceptance sampling uses statistical sampling to determine whether to accept or reject a production lot of material. It has been a common quality control technique used in industry and particularly the military for contracts and procurement. Acceptance sampling is a procedure used for sentencing incoming batches. The most widely used plans are given by the Military Standard tables, which were developed during World War II.

Sampling plans can be categorized across several dimensions:

·         Sampling by attributes vs. sampling by variables: When the item inspection leads to a binary result (either the item is conforming or nonconforming) or the number of nonconformities in an item are counted, then we are dealing with sampling by attributes. If the item inspection leads to a continuous measurement, then we are sampling by variables.

·         Incoming vs. outgoing inspection: If the batches are inspected before the product is shipped to the consumer, it is called outgoing inspection. If the inspection is done by the consumer, after they were received from the supplier, it is called incoming inspection.

·         Rectifying vs. non-rectifying sampling plans: Determines what is done with nonconforming items that were found during the inspection. When the cost of replacing faulty items with new ones, or reworking them is accounted for, the sampling plan is rectifying.

·         Single, double, and multiple sampling plans: The sampling procedure may consist of drawing a single sample, or it may be done in two or more steps. A double sampling procedure means that if the sample taken from the batch is not informative enough, another sample is taken. In multiple sampling, additional samples can be drawn after the second sample.