Human Capital and Operations Management

Human Resource Management (HRM) emerged as a specialist profession in the 1920s, dealing with concerns like as recruiting, training, personal issues, and appraisals, among others. Human capital management entails three distinct functions: operations management, management, and human resource management. There are numerous organizational types with various roles ranging from human resource management through management and operations management (Bennett, 1986). In smaller firms, the three functions may function as a single unit. Because using human operators is less expensive than using robots, robots are only utilized when the working conditions are too dangerous, difficult, or impossible for people to perform. It is from work-study that operations Management was realized and many believe that the scientific work of Taylor was first in terms of operations management. Work study deals with how assignment is done or in other terms division of labor. Taylor’s scientific innovation involved observing, measuring and documenting how workers did tasks to increase productivity (Bennett, 1986). Work study analysts have been creating projects to refine the principles of scientific management by

Creating flow diagrams to identify delays, redundancy and time wastage

Analyzing the worker at their station through motion studies to determine times required to transfer objects

Improving the ergonomics of a workstation to provide compatibility between man and machine

Work Design VS Work Study

Work design can be termed as roles associated with work assigned to a particular worker while work-study involves technical focus and performance. Work design combines work study, worker analysis, and environmental analysis. Parker and Wall (1998) reviewed and concluded that Taylor’s work was the like the first formalized school of work designs and they called it the job simplification school. Leseure and Brooks (2000) came up with a contingent model describing the schools of work design operate optimally as a function of knowledge context where the work activity is happening.

Institutions which have less worker interaction, and re-using knowledge job simplification will succeed. Job enrichment makes the managers develop environment that would fit rather an individual than groups and requires expertise for integration of the specialists. Activities that require knowledge re-use and extensive worker interaction can operate with self-managed teams, and this is especially in mass production sites. Parker and Wall (1998) discussed a job design school action theory which stated that whole actions should not be broken down and should not be allocated to a job.

References

Bennett, D.J. (1986) Production Systems Design. London: Butterworth.

Leseure, M. and Brookes, N. (2000) ‘Micro knowledge management: a job design framework’, in R. Rajkumar (ed.), Industrial Knowledge Management: A Micro Level Approach. London: Springer-Verlag, pp. 163-178.

Parker S. and Wall, T. (1998) Job and Work Design. London: Sage.