Impact of adopting industry 4.0 practices and technologies on time and motion study: a pilot study revealing efficiency gains in a multi-operation workstation

This article presents a time and motion study tool, that migrate from a descriptive approach to one based on data analysis. It presents the engineering design, its application, the analysis of the results obtained in a pilot study, the results of the validation procedure and the theoretical framework in operations management. The tool in question has been proved to be efficient for data collecting at workstations from video processing. It offers the means for intensive data collection, as alternative to sampling-based methods. The tool was developed with the aim of facilitating and speeding up the analysis of approximately 44 hours of video footage. The effort and processing time were significantly reduced by approximately 6 times, and the new method enabled detailed recording of each occurrence not foreseen in the process. This study makes a scientific contribution by proposing a roadmap for the development of the time and motion study.