Operations Management

Partial Productivity

A construction supervisor for a large homebuilder is interested in seeing whether there are ways of improving the profitability of the company through making better use of the people and equipment that are used to construct homes.

Respond to the following:

• Research the construction industry to learn what the inputs are that are used by such a homebuilder to build homes (the homes are obviously the output that is being produced by the homebuilder). Be sure to include some inputs that are not strictly labor (in other words, include things that are pieces of equipment or resources other than people).
• Give at least two examples of what a partial productivity statistic would be for some of the inputs that you identified.
• Give an example of something that would cause the partial productivity of a particular input to be reduced.
• Give an example of something that could be done to improve the partial productivity of some particular input.
• Describe how the overall productivity of the homebuilder would be calculated. In other words, how could the total productivity of all inputs be incorporated in a total productivity calculation.