Work measurement and the application of MTM has been greatly expanding in both scope and technology. It has grown from simple operation charting into time and motion procedures, on into predetermined time techniques and systems, and now is extensively used in the broad interdisciplinary prediction of almost all major aspects of human performance, aided by expanding computer technology.
It has long ago burst out of the confines of the factory production floor and is now widely applied in the clerical, business, financial, distribution, and social fields of human effort. It has even begun to be applied to highly complex mental work that can be somewhat goal defined-like the work of managers, engineers, accountants, etc. In fact, it seems to have no theoretical limit.
A further dimension of work measurement and MTM growth is across the different organizational processes forming a business. The first immediate application of MTM was within the production process of products and services.
Nowadays the most attractive application of MTM is within the product development process, when the industrial engineers work in team together with the designers, the process and the quality engineers starting from the earliest stages of the process (concurrent engineering). This has become possible in the last twenty years thanks to the launch of the third generation systems: SAM, UAS and MEK. Indeed, MTM-1 and MTM-2 motions are a biological classification of behavioural motions involved in human work. A motion pattern is a true picture of the human behaviour as work is accomplished.
In order to manage the numerous variables upon which the systems are built, the analyst must directly observe the job being done and the behaviour of the worker. On the contrary, the third generation systems are designed in such a way that the analyst does not need to observe the accomplishment of the work. Those systems are built upon geometrical variables which are not influenced by the worker’s behaviour. That’s the reason why at present it’s so easy to plan a working procedure just based upon a drawing and a rough description of the workplace.