Job production

Hand-separated large candlestick church chandelier with brass wax drip tray - GDR around 1980 - Use of armoured steel and brass - Single piece - Weight 10 kilograms

Job production, sometimes called jobbing or one-off production, involves producing custom work, such as a one-off product for a specific customer or a small batch of work in quantities usually less than those of mass-market products. Job production consists of an operator or group of operators to work on a single job and complete it before proceeding to the next similar or different job. ^[1] Together with batch production and mass production (flow production) it is one of the three main production methods. ^{[2] [3]}

Job production can be classical craft production by small firms (making railings for a specific house, building/repairing a computer for a specific customer, making flower arrangements for a specific wedding etc.), but large firms use job production, too, and the products of job production are often interchangeable, such as machined parts made by a job shop. Examples include:

• Designing and implementing an advertising campaign
• Auditing the accounts of a large public limited company
• Building a new factory
• Installing machinery in a factory
• Machining a batch of parts per a CAD drawing supplied by a customer
• Building the Golden Gate bridge

Fabrication shops and machine shops whose work is primarily of the job production type are often called job shops . The associated people or corporations are sometimes called jobbers.

Job production is, in essence, manufacturing on a contract basis, and thus it forms a subset of the larger field of contract manufacturing. But the latter field also includes, in addition to jobbing, a higher level of outsourcing in which a product-line-owning company entrusts its entire production to a contractor, rather than just outsourcing parts of it.

Benefits and disadvantages

Key benefits of job production include:

• can provide emergency parts or services, such as quickly making a machine part that would take a long time to acquire otherwise
• can provide parts or services for machinery or systems that are otherwise not available, as when the original supplier no longer supports the product or goes out of business (orphaned)
• work is generally of a high quality
• a high level of customization is possible to meet the customer's exact requirements
• significant flexibility is possible, especially when compared to mass production
• workers can be easily motivated due to the skilled nature of the work they are performing

Disadvantages include:

• higher cost of production
• re-engineering: sometimes engineering drawings or an engineering assessment, including calculations or specifications, needs to be made before the work can be done
• requires the use of specialist labor (compared with the repetitive, low-skilled jobs in mass production)
• slow compared to other methods (batch production and mass production)

Essential features

There are a number of features that should be implemented in a job production environment, they include:

• Clear definitions of objectives should be set.
• Clearly outlined decision making process.
• Clear list of specifications should be set.

See also

• Instant manufacturing
• Just In Time
• Lean manufacturing
• Manufacturing
• Piece work
• Outline of industrial organization

References

1. Production Process, Mechanical Engineering Community & Discussion, retrieved 2018-04-13.
2. Production Methods, BBC GCSE Bitesize, retrieved 2012-10-26.
3. One-off production, National Grid for Learning Cymru, retrieved: 2012-10-26.