Man days. They are a big part of determining how a business organizes its manufacturing process. It can also determine how much profit a business makes on one order.
Figuring out what a mans day consists of is crucial when it comes to quality control staff. In the United States alone, there are over 163,000 people whose job is to maintain quality assurance.
If you are a business owner, you may be trying to figure this out for yourself.
No worries. We will go over what a man day is and what it consists of when it comes to quality control.
What Is a Man Day?
A man day is how many hours it takes for someone in a company to do one day’s worth of work. Every company can be different when it comes to determining a man day.
For example, in the United States, a typical work day can range between 6-8 hours. However, in China, this can increase to 8-10 hours per day.
You need to keep these differences by country in mind because that could mean the difference when it comes to how much one employee can get done in one day. This is especially important in quality control where it may take a couple of extra hours to inspect something thoroughly.
Working Around Man Days
When it comes to man days, there are just some tasks where there is no getting around the length. If you want to do a proper inspection, then you have no choice but to follow the man days recommended.
However, depending on the number of items or the size of your product, there is one way that you can get around this. If you need to speed this inspection up, you do have the option of having more employees conduct the quality control inspection.
Let’s say your company determines that it is going to take eight man days to inspect every product that is going out for the next shipment from your warehouse.
Well, your company has a few options on how to go about this. They can either let one person take eight days to inspect everything, have two people inspect everything for four days, have four people inspect everything in two days, or have eight people inspect everything in one day.
The point is that knowing how long certain quality control tasks are going to take in advance does give your company an advantage. It allows you to properly prepare for the situation and put a staff together accordingly.
Determining a Man Day
The next thing you need to do is figure out how much work typically goes into a man day. You can do this by looking at your own numbers and seeing how many products get shipped out over a certain amount of time.
For example, let’s say you shipped 500 products out last week. However, quality control takes up 20% of the manufacturing time before you send those products out.
By that measurement, it means that it took your company one day to properly inspect all of your products and correct any errors before shipping them out.
Let’s say that this is a consistent number. If you know your company can inspect 500 products in a typical man day, then you can factor that accordingly when you get bigger orders.
Take a look at your recent shipments and add up the numbers. Then, determine what the average workday performance is.
Changing Products
One factor you have to consider when it comes to quality control is how long a proper inspection takes for each product. Depending on how complex a product is, it can result in a lot longer inspection process than your standard product.
In the example above, a man day consisted of inspecting 500 products. However, let’s say that with a new product, you can only inspect 250 products in a man day because of how thorough you have to be with it.
That is going to have to force your company to be adaptable. You are going to have to either have more staff available when this product is ready to be inspected or you will have to have a longer manufacturing process.
Either way, it is important to know as early as possible if your man day will be jeopardized by a new product.
Travel Time
Depending on your set of circumstances, you may have to factor in travel time with a man day. This may especially be the case if you are hiring a third-party inspection team.
Let’s say that someone spends six hours at the site doing quality control work on your product. However, that same person has two hours of travel time to get to your site.
If this is an independent contractor or someone that works for a third-party supplier, those two hours could count as part of a man day. In other words, you may only get six hours of actual inspection work instead of the typical eight hours.
Plan for this accordingly.
Explore Your Manufacturing Services Options
These are the most important things that you need to know about a man day. The basic definition of this is that it is the number of hours of work someone typically does in one day.
How productive that person can be depends on a few things. It depends on their work ethic, business organization, type of product if travel time is included or not, and more.
Do you need help with quality control inspection? Message us here with your questions.
