Personal, Unavoidable Delay, and Fatigue Allowances for Setting Performance Standards

A logical and systematic approach to determine and apply personal, unavoidable delay and fatigue allowances for setting reliable and equitable performance standards, especially for wage incentive application, is presented. Personal and unavoidable delay allowances should be determined for a group of similar jobs or for a department by work sampling. Fatigue allowances can be determined scientifically by physiological methods but companies may lack manpower or expertise to employ such methods. Reliable fatigue allowance values found in the literature should be used by companies in a consistent manner. A separate fatigue allowance should be provided for each classified working area. Since personal and unavoidable delay allowances are not a function of operator work efficiency or pace, they should be applied as fixed allowances in terms of minutes per day or an eight‐hour work shift basis, especially for wage incentive application. A comparative analysis among three methods, Conventional, Barnes and Das (author), revealed that the Das method of applying allowances would make a substantial saving in direct labour cost for a company. The fatigue allowance is a function of operator work efficiency, consequently it can be applied as a percentage of the normal time for only the effort or manual work time.