Production and Operations Management Systems Chapter 1: Introduction

Productivity – a Major Issue (continued)

• Productivity is relatively easy to measure for physical goods.
• It is more difficult to find appropriate measures for some services outputs such as units of education or health care.
• Creative knowledge workers provide other instances of intangible outputs that are highly valued, but elusive to calculate.
• The effort has to be made to appraise the value of these outputs in a standardized way to provide a benchmark (or standard) for measurement.
• The detailed discussion of the concept of productivity and its measurement are discussed in Chapter 2, Strategy, Productivity and History.