Dickeson--Conducting Job Pathology

Production standards as predictors are iffy at best. Production standards attempt to apply actuarial tables to job specifications in order to project what will happen. We try to apply actuarial experience tables to tell us which jobs will live and which will die.

No doctor can look at any person and predict life-span. So why do we constantly try to use actuaries to predict the life-span of a job? Chaos theory, where small variations in inputs cause major variations in output, frustrates application of specific job predictors. Scheduling, purchasing and materials management use their own variations of production standards based on their view of experience.