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Learning Curve Activity

In: Business and Management

Submitted By snaing
Words 523
Pages 3
During the classroom period, we were asked to form a team of two for each group. The purpose of the team is for each member to perform different tasks relating to the experiment. As I was paired my team mate within a reasonable amount of time, we collected the required materials for the experiment, in this case are four origami paper with different color on front and back sheet and a stapled five pages of instruction.
Firstly, we set up our station by clearing everything not related to the experiment and brought in extra tools, such as a smartphone to record the time of each task performed, a pen and a calculator. Before starting the experiment, we went through the given instruction on how to fold a place card within eight steps. As we get familiar with the process, we assigned our self with individual task on who would perform actual folding and who would be keeping track of the time taken of perform every finished place card. According to the text book, this is simply a delay relating to setting up the station and familiarizing the process. Then we began working on our first place card.
The first place card took us 2 minutes and 43 seconds to complete, which was also the longest processing time out of four. Then follow the second, third, and fourth with 1 minutes 21 seconds, 1 minutes 16 seconds, and 1 minutes 9 seconds respectively. We inspected our product every time before we moved them to storage. We observed the processing time for each place card became shorter as we gained efficiency on managing the folding process.
A few advantages we had in the classroom was there was no storage problem as the units numbers were low enough to place on the table. Also due to the simplicity of the task, there was no need for additional materials, hence saving us the transportation time during the experiment. After we completed folding four place card, we began to evaluate the time taken to complete each task and ultimately we calculated the average learning curve percentage for the task.
The result of our answer 1 was 0.5, also 50%. This means the cumulative average time (and cost) will decrease by 50 percent each time output doubles. The answer 2, 3, and 4 were 0.85, 1.35 and 0.68 respectively. The answer 4 being the most important part of this task, we also posted it on white board to compare with other teams. Our team’s average learning curve percentage of 68% was an acceptable range for the task. A 68% learning curve means that, for every doubling of output, the cost of new output is 68% of prior output.
This learning curve activity is useful in practical life as well. I have learned that by arranging the smoothness of the operation and avoiding delays due to transportation and storage beforehand, processing time could be effectively managed. Most importantly, the average learning curve percentage implies that we gain efficiency as we process more and more, whether it is learning something new or performing a new job.

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