Studying what happens in a factory late at night.
According to the institute's history, Magosaburo Ohara and physiologist Gito Teruoka visited Kurashiki Spinning's Manju mill late at night in February 1920. That summer, the researchers stayed in the workers' dormitory and studied working conditions, including the two-shift system. The Kurashiki Institute for Science of Labour was established in July 1921.[2]
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What is important about this progress is that it did not end with the management simply observing the site and expressing their impressions. Experts continue to visit the field to investigate the relationship between work and the body. Ohara's problem awareness was combined with Akishun et al.'s research methods.
The factory ledger records the production volume and material costs. However, the amount of fatigue that went into achieving that number does not reflect in the same way. If unmeasured burdens are treated as a problem of the person's patience or physical strength, management may misunderstand the cause.
The Institute explains its history as an effort to comprehensively understand labor from the human side.[4] Add another question to the view that only production equipment is subject to improvement: the conditions under which people can continue working. It is also the job of making visible costs that tend to be left outside of management.
Of course, there can be tension between the companies that support research and the researchers who present their findings fairly. Will you be able to accept even if the results are inconvenient for your company? The value of investing money needs to be considered along with an attitude of not making decisions based on one's own convenience.
伝Interpreting YAMATO DENSHI
Investigating burdens that do not appear in the figures.
When productivity increases, make sure that the burden of fatigue, rest, and rework is not shifted elsewhere. By combining feedback from the field and specialized research, we can reach areas for improvement that cannot be seen by results alone.