Time and Motion Study

You are a new Industrial Engineering Technician, working for Bates Manufacturing. The marketing department has decided to offer a line of specialty items and you have been assigned the task of determining the cost and manpower requirements for one of these - a ballpoint pen that is to be given out by salesmen as an advertising gimmick.

Your plant will receive the parts for the pen, a plain non-click model, from several different locations. The base of the pen has been sent to the printer for application of the customer's company logo; it arrives in boxes of 10,000. The refill part (holding the ink) arrives in separate boxes of 10,000; the cap arrives in the fourth and final box with 250,000 pieces per box.

Your job is to describe the process of assembling the pens that your production workers will follow, listing the equipment and operators needed and the cost per pen of assembly. You must ship a total of 50,000 of the pens in boxes containing one gross (144) each to your first customer - IMB. The marketing department estimates that business will eventually reach a rate of 20,000 pens per week.