Abstract
This paper reports briefly on the analyses of recent productivity development data carried out in four different companies with the expectation that learning/experience effects might be identified in different company settings. It may be recalled that the learning curve expresses that direct labor costs of an item or type of activity decrease at a constant percentage as the accumulated number of repetitions keeps doubling. Since organisational back-up would appear to facilitate faster learning, an experience component is often considered additional to the pure learning component, but separation of the two may prove difficult.
The two first companies offered uncomplicated examples of personal or small group learning with focus, first, on machine-assisted pile-driving, and second, on getting acquainted with a new offset printing press. The two last companies offered quite complicated examples of big group and organisational learning with focus, third, on the mounting of large package sorting systems by several teams working in parallel waves, and fourth, on aspects of learning how to build a new type of ship by a shipyard.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Rorsted, B.O. (1999). The learning curve revisited. A study in four companies. In: Mertins, K., Krause, O., Schallock, B. (eds) Global Production Management. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 24. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35569-6_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35569-6_45
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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