Human Resource Management Case - Palm Toy

Background

Palm-toy manufactures hand-held electronic games of various kinds. One part of the manufacturing process involves spraying paint on the plastic toy mouldings and hanging them on moving hooks that carry them through a drying oven. This operation, staffed entirely by women, is plagued by absenteeism, high staff turnover and low morale.

The Problem

The manufacturing process begins with injection plastic mouldings, which are ‘trimmed’ to remove any rough edges.  The mouldings are then passed through the paint room. The toys are predominantly two coloured, the base plastic colour plus one paint colour, although a few are made in more than two colours.  Each colour requires an additional trip through the paint- room. The painted mouldings are then passed to the assembly room where electronic components are inserted and the assembled toys are tested.

The painting operation has been recently re-engineered so that the eight women who do the painting sit in a line by an endless chain of hooks. These hooks are in continuous motion, and travel past the line of women into a horizontal oven. Each woman sits at her own painting booth, which is designed to carry away fumes and to backstop excess paint. The woman takes a plastic toy moulding from the tray beside her, positions it in a jig inside the painting cubicle, sprays on the colour according to a pattern, then releases the toy and hangs it on the hook passing by. The rate at which the hooks move has been calculated by the engineers so that each woman, when fully trained, can hang a painted toy on each hook before it passes beyond her reach. The women working in the paint room are on a group bonus payment plan. Since the operation is new to them, they also receive a bonus, which decreases by regular amounts each month. This ‘learning bonus’ is scheduled to vanish in six months, by which time it is expected that they will be on their own – that is, able to meet the standard and to earn a group bonus when they exceed it.

It is now the second month of the training period. The women have learned more slowly than had been anticipated, and it now looks as though their production is going to stabilise far below what was planned for.  Many of the hooks are going empty. The women complain that the hooks are going too fast, and that the ‘time-study man’ has set rates incorrectly. A few women have already quit and have had to be replaced by new women, which has further aggravated the learning problem. The team spirit that management had expected to develop automatically through the group bonus is not in evidence, except as an expression of what the engineers call ‘resistance’. One woman whom the group regard as its leader (and the management regard as a ‘trouble-maker’) is very outspoken and is continually making complaints to the supervisor on behalf of the group. These complaints have all the variety customary in such instances of generalised frustration: the job is a messy one, the hooks move too fast, the incentive pay is not being correctly calculated, and anyway it is too hot working so close to the drying oven.

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