Industrial Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

A standard time is a number that decides how many people are employed, what a job costs, whether a line is balanced and sometimes whether someone earns a bonus. It is produced by watching a person work and applying judgement to what was seen. Everybody downstream treats it as a measurement. Almost nobody downstream can see the judgement, because the document that recorded it stopped at the number.

We edit what industrial engineers and work study practitioners produce — time study records and standard time documentation, method study reports and process analyses, allowance schedules and their justifications, line balancing and takt time documentation, capacity models and staffing calculations, standard work documentation and cycle definitions, layout and material flow studies, ergonomics and workload assessments, productivity improvement business cases, work measurement policies and procedures, performance and incentive scheme documentation, and simulation study reports and assumptions. Our editors work on the document that turns an observation into a number.

The time study record is the document that must justify itself years later, and its weakness is always the same: the observed times are recorded meticulously and everything that converted them into a standard is compressed into two words. We write these so the element breakdown is described precisely enough to be repeated, with the break points named as observable events rather than as stages in a narrative; so the rating applied to the operator is stated with the basis for it, because rating is the largest and most contestable judgement in the whole exercise and burying it makes the standard indefensible; so allowances are itemised individually — relaxation, personal, contingency, process-related — with a reason for each rather than a combined percentage that has been carried forward from a study nobody can find; so the conditions of the study are recorded, covering the equipment, materials, layout and anything unusual about the shift, since a standard set during a supply substitution describes a job that no longer exists; so the number of cycles and the variation between them appears, given that a standard from six cycles with a wide spread is a different object from one from forty; and so what the standard excludes is stated explicitly. Records written this way survive the argument that eventually comes.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including studies, operational data and client information. We are editors rather than work study practitioners, and we offer no view on ratings, allowances or standards. What we can do is make the judgement visible alongside the number it produced.