Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 November 27

= November 27 =

What do you call this kind of company inefficiency?
Let's say you have an employee that's trained to do parts 1, 2, and 3, for an assembly. But a 2nd employee, is only trained to do parts 2. The 2nd employee cannot do parts 1 or 3. But this part 2 has a relation where it depends on part 3 to be finished, for example, the table for part 2 can fill up, which needs to be transferred to part 3. So, the 2 employees work on part 2 together, product-by-product. But, the 1st employee does not want to do part 3, so that employee then starts part 1. Then the employee that is only trained to do part 2, is deadlocked, for he has nothing to do, must wait for someone else to do part 3, so he can continue part 2. And the 1st employee say, fills up part 1 table, and the 2nd employee would have to find a new empty table to continue doing part 2, which, let's say, there are none, so therefore this results in a type of inefficiency. Can there be a word for this type of inefficiency? I think in computers, we call this... deadlocked. But that term only applies for 1-employee to be deadlocked, not the group of employees as a whole. 67.165.185.178 (talk) 07:50, 27 November 2022 (UTC).
 * In computing, the term deadlock is generally used for a situation in which none of a group of multiple processes cannot make progress because each is waiting for another process in the group. In the example, employee 1 could make progress by doing part 3; their not doing so is not by force but by choice. It sounds like employee 1 is a lazy bum; the reason for production coming to a halt is their attitude. If all employees go on strike a company will experience a rather strong kind of inefficiency, for which I think there is no specific term. I guess that is also true for the inefficiency caused by an individual employee's reluctance to do their job. --Lambiam 13:04, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You might be interested in the optimal job scheduling article and the links. I think this would be a class of unrelated-machines scheduling, but i can't terms for any specific inefficiencies. fiveby(zero) 15:41, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * If you guys can think of any related examples in the work environment, feel free to post them too. I think Lambiam's 1st example of deadlock is where all the employees are equally on a deadlock - such a case could be in government, like criminal prosecutors in a court. They cannot drop charges without a supervisor. And if no supervisor is in the court, then they simply ask the judge for a continuance. 67.165.185.178 (talk) 15:56, 27 November 2022 (UTC).
 * Your line balancing failure has created a botleneck? fiveby(zero) 16:32, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Rather than to the judiciary the combination of terms "management" and "amateurism" leads to only very few positives --Askedonty (talk) 16:53, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Idk if that exact type of deadlock has a name, but the general topic of analyzing and optimizing these situations is calledoperations research, a term from before computers really a thing.  2601:648:8200:990:0:0:0:497F (talk) 02:27, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I'd also go with bottleneck, due to insufficient employee qualifications. --Ouro (blah blah) 08:11, 28 November 2022 (UTC)