In assembly, every hand movement counts. Long routes, search times, and unfavorable grasping zones cost cycle time, increase strain, and creep into everyday work unnoticed. With consistent time and motion analysis at the workstation, you make these losses visible and put workflows on a stable, ergonomic foundation.
Combining route observation, optimized grasping zones, and metrics leads to fast, reliable decisions. It's particularly convincing in VR: you walk through the model, check movements and postures, compare variants, and share a common picture of the solution, even without up-to-date CAD data. Halocline helps you create variants, make walking routes visible, and document decisions traceably.
Time and motion analysis focuses on all movements that add no value: walking, searching, turning, unnecessary grasping paths. The goal is to spot waste, improve grasping zones, and stabilize cycle time. To do this, you consistently arrange supply according to the ABC principle: frequent items in the A zone within immediate reach, recurring items in the easily accessible B zone, rare items in the C zone. The clearer the separation, the shorter the grasping paths and the lower the variation.
In practice, the effects show quickly:
Typical triggers for a time and motion analysis are new launches, layout changes, noticeably fluctuating cycles, ergonomic risks, or clear deviations between planned and actual times.
You capture real routes by observation or short video recordings over several cycles and transfer start points, changes of direction, and repetitions into a spaghetti diagram. Clusters show you where a different arrangement or supply concept pays off. For the time component, a video-based evaluation of 20 to 30 cycles is often enough to get reliable averages. You avoid bias by working normally, placing the camera unobtrusively, and excluding outliers only with a reason. If you run through the workflow in VR and record it, Halocline creates the spaghetti diagram directly in the model, so you can compare the effect of variants right away.
The zone layout with A, B, and C zones creates clear reaches and shortens grasping paths. Guide values from MTM (Methods-Time Measurement) and REFA help you classify elements such as grasping, searching, walking, or positioning plausibly without getting lost in formulas. This lets you compare variants objectively and spot deviations early.
Key metrics are:
Halocline is the planning platform for production layouts and workstations. You start with a quickly walkable model: either you import existing 3D data, or you build the workstation with standard objects from the library, with no training required. Then you place tables, racks, containers, and tools to scale, set the grip heights, and create variants.
If you run through the workflow in VR and record it, the spaghetti diagram shows the walking routes, and the recording provides routes and times. This lets you compare route length and walking time share per variant and derive the effect on cycle time. You export the data as a tabular report, and with the MTMmotion export you transfer the recording directly into an MTM analysis. Grasping area avatars show the optimal and maximum grasping area for the body height you set, according to DIN 33402-2 and DIN EN ISO 14738, and the ergonomics analysis based on the key indicator method marks problematic object movements.
Collaboration brings speed and clarity. One person walks through the variants in VR while the team follows the walkthrough in spectator mode on screen, discusses grasping paths, lines of sight, and postures, and records decisions with labels directly at the object. Before-and-after images, short notes, and defined criteria ensure traceability. Quick improvements often show up in:
This is how you transfer principles such as ABC arrangement and standard grasps from a single workstation to the line and on to the shopfloor layout.
The result is shorter loops, lower change costs, and noticeably more stable cycles. Route length and walking time share decrease measurably, and the team shares a common understanding of the solution, because everyone has seen the variant in the walkable model. At Siemens in Karlsruhe, workstation design with Halocline became 4x faster.
Want to check routes and times at your workstation before you rebuild? Get started for free with Halocline Free and build your first workstation in 3D. For process analysis and the ergonomics check, get in touch and we'll show you the right scope.
