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History
The original MODAPTS data was developed by
Mr. G. C. "Chris" Heyde. As Mr. Heyde tells his story, he
was working in a large Tobacco firm in Australia during the
1930's. Although trained as a Chemical Engineer, he spent a
large part of his time developing production standards for the
company. In his situation a few standards were excessively
tight, but many were excessively loose. This consistency was
attributed to the fact that time was used to develop the
standards. Time study requires that an analyst evaluate the
speed of the effectiveness of the employee. This evaluation,
called performance rating, is very subjective, open to opinion
and bias. Thus inconsistent standards are the rule, rather than
the exception.
Following a job change, Mr. Heyde worked for a multi plant
organization, managing the standards department. He supervised
12 time study analyst, all engaged in developing production
standards for various activities throughout the several plants.
Again, he found difficult to develop consistent standards, even
with frequent training sessions in performance rating. However,
he did find a way to speed up the standards development process,
by using block data. Not only did this approach speed up the
process, it also improved the consistency. Still, where
physically demanding work was involved, consistency remained a
problem.
In 1954, Mr. Heyde began to use MTM and to a lesser extent, Work
Factor. Using these systems he found that the time and cost
involved in developing standards increased dramatically.
Realizing the principle of using predetermined time values was
sound, Mr. Heyde began a search for a system that could be
applied in far less time than the required by MTM or Work
Factor.
In early 1960's MTM-2, simplified data system based on MTM-1
elements was introduced in Sweden. Through various combinations
and rearrangements, the MTM-2 data table was drastically
reduced. However Chris Heyde thought even more could be done,
particularly in regards to reassigning time values to the body
part used. It was at this time that Mr. Heyde began the
development of a system that could be easily memorized and that
contained only whole integer time values. He tested every
conceivable method of presenting predetermined time data for
ease of use, ease of learning and consistency of results. In
1966, MODAPTS was introduced. It retrieved immediate acceptance
and today ranks among the most popular in the world.
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