CASE STUDY

Case Study



Case Study

Timbuk2 was born an original on the streets of San Francisco back since 1989. Stitch-by-stitch, bag-by-bag, this city-born and trill (street-tough) child has constructed itself a solid reputation and a loyal next among real-life, hard-working two wheeler messengers, biking enthusiasts and common-folks alike.

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The underneath post was an assignment for the Principles of Management class at Umass-Amherst. The question posed was if Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management would be beneficial for Rob Honeycutt, the proprietor of Timbuk2 Designs. Part of this assignment was also to post a response to my classmate's responses; I have not encompassed this piece of the assignment but may publish it in a separate post. For the curious, the case background for this question can be discovered on page 47 of Management by Stephen Robbins and Mary Coulter border=0 v:shapes="_x0000_i1025"> . These discussion posts were part of the great learning know-how of this class, in fact, I discovered the discussions in this online course to be more substantial and interactive than most of my on-campus courses!

Timbuk2 has already used principles of scientific management to result a positive change in the effectiveness and effectiveness of their output line. In particular, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth would be pleased of Timbuk2's decision to eliminate the middle-man, and the wasted hand and body motions of handing off products to a carrier who brings the products to the next area of the assembly line. Having each employee proceed down the sewing line seems like it would also assist hold workers alert by having them proceed around instead of sitting or standing at one station all day. I'm not rather sure what scientific principles are in play here (maybe geometry-the shortest distance between two points being a straight line) but the use of the Toyota Sewing System decisively helps Timbuk2 proceed towards the "'one best way' for a job to be done" (Robbins & Coulter, 28) and the idea of the Toyota Sewing System is the device that helps the workers progress to that "one best way".

One way that organizational behavior would assist Rob is to make sure all the sewing line workers are in-sync with each other.

In my brain, it seems the sewing line is set up so there's a employee at each station and as they finish at that station they proceed to the next one. If the workers are not motivated and observant of each other, bottlenecks would evolve at certain stations or with certain individuals thus throwing off the output for the entire ...