Describing highly variable processes with Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA)

WURA WTFAn easy way to understand Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA) is to start with its predecessor, Product-Quantity-Routing (PQR) analysis. You’ll find PQR analysis used in settings where there are a lot of small-batch custom orders. Take a print shop, paint shop, or light manufacturer that has to set up and configure workspaces and equipment for a specific run of work, ship those off, and then re-set and re-configure things for the next, different, run. This is an environment where some things are always different, and other things are always the same. Knowing which materials—supplies, stable intermediate forms, scrap/junk, and final products (P)—are being produced and in what quantities (Q) as they’re routed (R) across the shop becomes the basis for various insights.WURA was the extension of this analytical approach to clinical settings, and from there into other types of work—including the hopelessly computer-addled work I get involved in. To call the products of labor ‘work…