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 labour content in

general

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

6. providing fair returns on possible