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ISG Steelton-International Steel Group, Steelton, Pennsylvania

The supervisor needs to motivate 6 college students to load scrap metal onto rail cars in 2 weeks instead of the usual 6 weeks. Each piece of scrap metal weighs 92 pounds and there is no way to use machinery to load it. To motivate the students and address the physical fatigue of carrying heavy metal, the supervisor will need to change the way the work is done.

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Jonathan Figueroa
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104 views1 page

ISG Steelton-International Steel Group, Steelton, Pennsylvania

The supervisor needs to motivate 6 college students to load scrap metal onto rail cars in 2 weeks instead of the usual 6 weeks. Each piece of scrap metal weighs 92 pounds and there is no way to use machinery to load it. To motivate the students and address the physical fatigue of carrying heavy metal, the supervisor will need to change the way the work is done.

Uploaded by

Jonathan Figueroa
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ISG Steelton–International Steel Group, Steelton, Pennsylvania

As the day-shift supervisor at the ISG Steelton steel plant, you summon the six college students who
are working for you this summer, doing whatever you need done (sweeping up, sandblasting the inside
of boilers that are down for maintenance, running errands, and so forth). You walk them across the
plant to a field where the company stores scrap metal. The area is stacked with organized piles of
metal. You explain that everything they see has just been sold. Metal prices have finally risen enough
that the company can earn a small profit by selling its scrap.

You point out that railroad tracks divide the field into parallel sectors, like the lines on a football field,
so that each stack of metal is no more than 15 feet from a track. Each stack contains 90 pieces of
metal. Each piece weighs 92 pounds and is about a yard long and just over 4 inches high and 4 inches
wide. You tell the students that, working as a team, they are to pick up each piece, walk up a ramp to
a railroad car that will be positioned next to each stack, and then neatly position and stack the metal
for shipment. That’s right, you repeat, 92 pounds, walk up the ramp, and carry the metal onto the rail
car. You explain that a forklift could be used only if the metal were stored on wooden pallets (it isn’t);
if the pallets could withstand the weight of the metal (they would be crushed); and if you, as their
supervisor, had forklifts and people trained to run them (you don’t). In other words, the only way to get
the metal into the rail cars is for the students to carry it.

Based on an old report from the last time the company sold some of the metal, you know that workers
typically loaded about 30 pieces of metal parts per hour over an 8-hour shift. At that pace, though, it
will take your six students 6 weeks to load all of the metal. But the purchasing manager who sold it
says it must be shipped in 2 weeks.

• Without more workers (there’s a hiring freeze) and without forklifts, all of the metal has
to be loaded by hand by these six workers in 2 weeks. But how do you do that? What
would motivate the students to work much, much harder than they have all summer?
They’ve gotten used to a leisurely pace and easy job assignments.

• Motivation might help, but motivation will only get so much done. After all, short of
illegal steroids, nothing is going to work once muscle fatigue kicks in from carrying
those 92-pound pieces of metal up a ramp all day long. What can you change about the
way the work is done to deal with the unavoidable physical fatigue?

If you were the supervisor in charge, what would you do?

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