Roofer Productivity

Date: 14/09/2015

Subject: Productivity analysis

To: The director of operations

From: The supervisor of roof installation crews

Introduction

This memorandum addresses the issue of productivity for the roofer installation crews. The analysis is performed with an aim to compare the current year and last year productivity of the crew, analyze the relation of the productivity and the size of the crew and lastly, make some recommendations based on the findings.

Findings

The analysis of the year over year productivity change suggests that this year average crew productivity is higher by 4.56% than the last year average productivity of the crew.

The productivity of the each crew member decreases along with the increase in the size of the operations crew. Thus, the productivity of two crew members is higher than the productivity of the three-member team. Moreover, the productivity of each worker in a team consisting of four employees is lower than the productivity of the three-member team.

The mentioned findings suggest that the roofer constructing team should consist of 2 workers.

Discussion

According to the Field (Field 2008), productivity is a measure of output to the certain combination of inputs (one, two or total). The key factors that are usually associated with productivity are labor and capital inputs. Thus, scientists define total productivity (which is the ratio of total output to all input factors), total factor productivity (the ratio of total output to the sum of input factors) and partial productivity (the ratio of the total output to the one input factor) (Stevenson, 1999). In our case, we do not contain any other than labor productivity factors in our analysis. So, this memorandum uses the partial factor productivity.

Method.  The analysis uses the data collected for the roof installation company for the last two years. The data includes the crew size (number of employees) and the total quantity of square feet of roof installed. Thus, the data is used to perform quantitative analysis and calculate the partial productivity of the labor factor, the difference in average productivity between two years and to research whether the productivity of each employee depends on the crew size.

Main Analysis.  The collected data were used for calculation of labor productivity. In order to do this, the following formula was used:

Employee productivity per hour = number of square feet of roof installed/ 2 months/4 weeks/40 hours/size of the crew;

The results for this year are presented in the Table 1.

The same formula was applied to calculate the productivity for the last year. The results are presented in Table 2.

Table 1. Labor productivity for the last year

The results of our calculations show that the average annual productivity of one employee increased. The increase in absolute value is 15,7335069 – 15,0477431 = 0,6857636 (square feet installed by 1 worker per 1 hour). The percentage difference of the change in productivity is (15,7335069 – 15,0477431)/ 15,0477431*100%=4,56%. Thus, we determined that productivity of the employees increased by 4.56% year over year.

In addition, the analysis detected that the productivity depends on the crew size. The Table 3 shows the average productivity of the crew, consisting of two, three, or four workers for this year.

Table 3. Labor productivity depending on the crew size for this year

The Table 4 shows the average productivity of the crew, consisting of 2, 3 or 4 workers for the last year.

Table 4. Labor productivity depending on the crew size for the last year

The common feature for the Table 3 and Table 4 is that the productivity of the small team is higher than the productivity of the larger team.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) does not provide the relevant data to compare the company’s data with the national average productivity for this occupation.

Recommendations.  The analysis suggests that productivity of the labor grows year over year. The increase detected from the last to this year is 4.56%. The important finding is the dependence of the productivity upon the crew size. The calculations suggest that labor productivity is higher when the crew consists of two people. Thus, it is recommended that the company organize the staff in groups of no larger than two employees. In such a way, the total labor productivity within a company will increase.

You can ask us “write my memo” on this or any other topic at 123HelpMe.org. Don’t waste your time, order now!

Limitations.  The calculation of the crew productivity is based on some assumptions. Specifically, we suppose that each month contains four weeks and each employee works 40 hours per week. This assumption allows simplification of the calculations. However, the months may contain more than 4 work weeks, like 4 weeks and 2 days. This difference may influence the calculations of productivity of one worker. However, as soon as we use the data for the comparison (so that the same assumption is applied for the two years), this difference does not affect the overall result. Besides, we assume that the productivity of the crew depends only on the size of team and productivity of each worker (labor productivity). In real life, total productivity of the team will depend also on the productivity of the capital (technologies, materials, equipment).