CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE ESSAY
Management study has revolved over long period of time and successive
means of thought in industry and commerce have severely described it as
the basic ingredient of administering a business.
In support of this view Yakubu (1989) defined management “as a social
process entailing responsibility for effective and economical planning
and regulation of the operation of an enterprise, in fulfillment of
given purpose or tasks” while organization have been working hard to
attaining the purpose for which they have been established, the issue of
the time it takes to achieve this often neglected. This situation is
unfortunate and need to be taken seriously by organizations if the
attainment of set goals is to be at maximum profit.
In other words, organization have to properly manage the time it take
to attain their goals so as to reduce costs to the bearest minimum.
Adamu (1974) has defined time management as “the art of planning a
job, measuring such jobs through reducing such activities to time
elements (expressed in terms of pieces per unit or time per piece) and
monitoring it to determine efficiency and productivity.
This implies that work must be divided among and between specialist
workers with at a time instead of the whole, thus minimum effort is
applied by individual workers and maximum output achieved.
Despite the gaining advantage of time management or not attention is paid to it by organization.
This evident when one carefully leads individual workers exclaims
that it is not my factors business are also find a lot of individual
working hard over organization are meant of the theories of management.
At independence, the size of its armed forces were small and growth
was to be a gradual process, and if the influence of the country was to
be yet in the sub region, Africa and the world at large, a dynamic
foreign policy was to be vigorously pursued.
To meet the part of the increasing needs of armed forces, the Omimi
shoes factory was producing boots for the whole army and local textile
mills; rolled out materials for the working dressed of officers and men
of the armed forces. In essence a good number of quarter master items
were already being produced locally to ensure that military orders for
annum action will be met without resorting to massive importation, the
federal government set up the defence Industrial Corporation of Nigeria
(DICON).
DICON came into being by act of parliament in 1964. it was charged
with the responsibility of locally manufacturing of ammunitions for the
armed forces, to reduce its over dependence on foreign countries for its
ammunition requirements. It was charged with responsibilities of:
- Operation, maintenance and control of ordinance factories for
the manufacture, storage and disposal of ordinance and ancillary stores
and materials intended for or capable of being used by the armed forces.
- Operation of any ordinance factory under its control on a sound
commercial basis so as to fill the normal defence requirements of the
armed forces.
- Utilization of any excess capacity for meeting civilian needs of Nigeria on the approval of council of ministers.
- Inspection and testing or ordinance and materials for use by the
armed forces and duty to recommend for adopting or rejection as the case
may be.
- Testing and inspection on behalf of any of the government of the
federation any substance, material, machine or any other thing intended
for capable of being used by the armed forces.
To speed up the achievement of the above goals, the federal invited a
West German arm manufacturing firm of Frintzwerne to provide the
technical expertise required to set up an ordinance factory in Kaduna,
to produce rifles, sub-machine suns and pistols under license. It was
also to produce hand grenades and ammunition for the above range of
small arms.
Presently, DICON is running industries complex in the premises of the
old ordinance factory in Kakuri Kaduna south. The constituent factories
are:
A: Armament Factory (ARMFAC)
B: DICON Casting Company (DCC)
C: DICON Furniture Company (DFC)
The headquarter of the corporation is in Kaduna and is structured to have five (5) directorates as follows:
- Directorate of Administration
- Directorate of Finance
- Directorate of Plan and Engineering Services
- Directorate of Production and
- Directorate of Research and Development
The DICON has staff strength of 967 it is also headed by a director
general who must be a serving military officer of the rank of Brigadier
and above.
He is assisted by the directors and all staffs under them are
answerable to their directors. However, the researcher will limit
herself to the head quarters which has a staff strength of 124, among
whom are five (5) Directorates, 17 executives officers and 54 junior
staff.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Despite the importance of time in the provision of services in
organization, not much attention seems to have been paid to it. There
are those who hold the minority opinion that paper qualification, not
withstand ability to carry out assigned roles (basing time used) should
take precedence over ability to effectively use minimum time to produce
maximum outputs, consequently time management is not given the attention
it deserved, and when used to quantify jobs- it is applied sparingly,
which is insufficient to show results, it is because of those
development that this identified the following problems for the essay:
That there is the existence of ignorance on part of management as
regards to scope and specific use of time saving formalities. That where
such skills exists, the level of utilization is too marginal.
That lack of prior training of executive secretaries etc in the
schedule of duty, delegating duties when possible, to enhance output at
its end of the day is another cause for concern.
That the introduction of such methods leads to exploitation of work.
OBJECTIVES OF THE ESSAY
The major objectives of this essay is to examine the effect of time
management on the production of goods and services, as well as to
determine the lessons, if any to be learnt from the results of data
collected through this essay.
However, in specific terms the essay is address the following issues:
- To find out the time consciousness of the staff in relation to their productivity.
- To asses how time is been managed in the organization of productivity purposes.
- To asses the effects of time management on productivity in an organization improvement of productivity
- To identify the problem of time management in the organization.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ESSAY
Considering the importance of effective time management to the
attainment to set goals by organization, it is hoped that the findings
of this essay would be of benefit to executives, junior workers,
secretaries and future researchers.
EXECUTIVES
This essay is expected to provide needed information for executives
on time saving methods and how they can utilize them to enhance
productivity.
JUNIOR WORKERS
It is hope that junior worker would capitalized on time management
device to specialize and realize lifelong ambitions by meeting personal
and organization goals and objectives.
SECRETARIES
This essay is expected to re-educate secretaries and how best to
manage their time by actualizing in the pursuance of excellence from
lesson gained from this essay.
FUTURE RESEARCHERS
Future researchers are expected to use the finding of this essay as materials for further studies orrelated studies.
SCOPE OF THE ESSAY
This essay covers the effect and problems of time management in an organization and it workforce using DICON.
In doing this DICON with large number of staffs would be utilized to
solicit intention on whether or not the organization are aware of the
services of the time management and the application effect of time
management productivity.
LIMITATION OF THE ESSAY
This essay work requires time, and a lot of moving around. The
limitation of time was a major encumbrance encountered by the researcher
in the cause of her work. The fact that the research work requires the
researcher to move around from the headquarters in the metropolis into
the factory complex at Kakuri requires money, which the researcher is
short of.
In effect the researcher had to limit herself to the corporation headquarters in the metropolis.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Management: Ability to direct human activities in the production process.
Time: Ability to guage time used to produce a portion of work expressed in terms of pieces per unit or time per piece.
Tool: This refers to an instrument in management
terms, usually a person, used by another organization a purpose, aimed
at achieving results.
Productivity: Efficiency of works in industrial production.
Organization: The coming together of individuals with common goals and aspiration.