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THE MARINE REVIEW VOL. 42 CLEVELAND SEPTEMBER, 1912 NEW YORK No. 9 Cost Estimating for Jobbing Work 'Describing the Organization and Procedure in the 6 Be ideal way to estimate the cost {ot a Job iee-to make a time study of the 'operations in- volved, and to build up the total cost therefrom. This is a comparatively simple matter for manufacturing jobs, especially if done by piece work or under a,premium system of payment, but is an impracticable method of estimating the cost of repair work for various reasons. In the first place, jobs are exactly alike; no two frepair and a very. Hull Division of the Philadelphia Navy Yard By J A Furer, Naval Constructor mates is not well adapted. Such estimates have been in the past, and still are, in a great many plants made by the foremen of the various trades. At the best, estimates made in this manner are only good guesses, based on the past experience of the fore- man, as he has neither the time nor the inclination to keep extensive rec-_ 'ords of actual unit costs fronr whfch to build) up accurate estimates. _ By long experience, the practical man can, of course, arrive at a point FLANGED JOINTS, MAKING, 4" PIPE. DATE LABOR MATERIAL SPECIFICATION Based on cloth inserted rubber|e-12-l) Marking holes & cut- asket. to asket. Setting u She a 4-15-14 Average per joint, 70 Maximum per joint, 1 |45 Minimum per joint, 30 Units taken from 34 joints, alveraging |5.4|bolts per joint. Maximum is cost of a joint in|very cramped location on ship. Mimimum represents best shop conditions. Hie. t complete analysis of each job is apt to cost nearly as much as the work itself. Then, too, repair jobs must usually be done by day work, and an output of the workman under this system of compensation corres- ponding to the possible performance indicated by a scientific time study cannot be expected. Ship repairs and alterations afford a particularly good example of job- bing work to which the scientific time. study method gf making esti- where he is capable of very shrewd guessing as to the probable cost of a job; but when one hears of a foreman whose estimates made in this manner are invariably correct, it is usually reasonable to suspect that he watches the cost of the jobs closely, and that it is in his' power to switch charges from those jobs on which his estimates were low to other jobs so as to come out right. Certain it is that the establishment which depends entirely on its fore- men for making estimates will lose much business, because some of its bids are too high, and will get other business resulting in loss because its bids are too low. Although minute studies may not be practicable for jobbing work, es- timates which are far superior to those ordinarily made by the super- visory force of the production depart- ment can be obtained by establishing an estimating section, and by record- ing actual cost data in. such form that it will be readily available for building up future estimates. Indus- trial managers can still be foufd who consider the cost of a separate es- timating department an unprofitable overhead expense. A very large ma- jority of managers realize, however, that such. a department more than . pays its way by relieving the super- visory force of the burden of paper work involved in making estimates, and by the more reliable estimates © which can be obtained therefrom. The first thing which strikes the manager in transferring estimating work to a separate department is the paucity of data available for making estimates other than by the guessing method. The foreman, when asked for his data, will generally say that he knows about how much a me- chanic and his helper can do in. a day, and that he has not found it necessary to accumulate a _ large amount of unit cost data in order to make estimates. This statement may be quite true in the case of a shrewd foreman so far as the work of that particular foreman's trade is con- cerned; but as a repair job is sel- dom confined to one trade only, the foreman, in making his estimate, must either spend considerable time in get- ting estimates for the other trades from the foreman concerned, or he