What Is MTM And Why It Still Matters

We unpack Method Time Measurement (MTM) with ReThink Productivity’s Simon Woodfield and Ed Thompson, from its 1940s roots to modern use with motion capture and VR. The chat explains how MTM coding works, and why fair, consistent standards matter.

• Origins of MTM
• Motion codes, influence factors and TMUs explained
• When to use MTM versus a stopwatch
• Hybrid approaches for fixed steps and variable customer moments
• Training pathways and the main MTM variants
• Building quick business cases with what‑if scenarios
• Leveraging CAD, VR and motion capture for pre‑build timing
• Ergonomic insights alongside time standards

 Find out more at the UKMTM Website

We just wanted to remind everybody that as of 1st January 2026, the UK MTM Association is now part of ReThink Productivity

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Chapters

• 0:09 UK MTM Association Joins Rethink
• 0:20 Mini‑Series And Guest Intros
• 2:32 What MTM Means And Where It Began
• 3:12 Why Motions Beat Stopwatches
• 4:27 Influence Factors And Coding In TMUs
• 6:00 Training Path And MTM Variants
• 7:10 When To Use MTM Vs Stopwatch
• 8:31 Benefits, What‑Ifs, And Ergonomics
• 10:04 VR, Motion Capture, And Pre‑Build Timing
• 12:05 Closing Thoughts And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:05

Before we start this episode, I just wanted to remind everybody that as of the first of January, we're delighted that the UK MTM Association is now part of Rethink Productivity. Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. This is a mini-series we're recording. There'll be three episodes with our friends from Rethink, Simon Woodfield and Ed Thompson, and we are talking about MTM. We'll get into the detail of what it means and what it is, but first I'll do a few intros. Ed, thanks for joining us. Do you want to say hi to everybody and just give us a bit of background of what you do?

SPEAKER_01: 0:38

Yeah, no problem. Thank you, Simon. Um, yeah, really happy to be here and talk about MTM. So I'm one of the program managers at Rethink, and I'll run projects on that day-to-day basis. And as part of that, we'll be using MTM methodologies appropriate. So excited to give you all a rundown of what MTM is and how it can help for business.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04

Thank you. Um, welcome Simon Woodfield.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

Hello there, thank you, Simon. Yeah, it's great to be on the podcast. My first and hopefully one of many to come.

unknown: 1:14

Good.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15

Um tell us a bit about what you do at Rethink and what you did did before coming back, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20

Yeah, so I joined Rethink about about six years ago now. Joined as a product analyst, really good. Sort of got me to see a working life from a different perspective. And then an opportunity came up to help Simon Taylor in MTM, and he developed me as an instructor. Uh, I've been doing the instructing work now for three years full-time, and then uh I've come back to Rethink now that um Rethink have absorbed the MTM as part of the uh day-to-day operations. So, really excited to be back doing the MTM instruction work and also back doing some of the product and analysis work out in the field as well. So, uh yeah, very exciting.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01

Brilliant. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Ed. So we'll get into the the detail, and I suppose I should subtitle these episodes with MTM, and we'll talk about what it means and what it does. Is it a tricky thing to describe as well. So we'll do our best to dumb it down, keep it simple, and not get too drawn into the detail. But Simon Woodfield, so I've I've talked about MTM. What does it mean? What does it stand for? Where does it come from?

SPEAKER_00: 2:29

Yeah, so MTM stands for method time measurement. It's a predetermined motion time system that assigns time values to basic human motions rather than timing the whole tasks. Um it was developed in the 1940s in the US by Maynard, Stigmerten, and Schweb to bring a consistent work measurement to the workplace. Um so yeah, it's uh it's a different way of doing it. It's an uh sort of loses the ability to to need a stopwatch and to sort of rate people, so it is uh a little bit more clean from from that point of view.

SPEAKER_02: 3:07

Perfect. And and Ed, kind of core principles, what what are the key things that MTM gives you rather than standing there timing what somebody's physically doing with a stopwatch?

SPEAKER_01: 3:19

So a lot of this comes back to what Salman has just said about the the foundations of it back in the 1940s. There were two schools of thought in America basically, where you had Taylor who had his stopwatch, and then you had Gilbraith who had his recording motion capture in a camera. The idea behind the camera, and this is what MTM sort of is derived from, is the ability to break things down into a lot of detail that you can't get with a with a stopwatch, and to describe a method rather than just what's being completed in front of you. So the fact that you can record the process, get a method out of it, you can then look at that method in a lot more detail and start to chip away at little bits in it to gain time in that production cycle. So it's all about removing movements from cycles, simplifying work, and making the work easier to be completed by the person who's doing that that task.

SPEAKER_02: 4:22

So we've got, if I'm reading this right, then a foundation of of times. So this this big bank of times we see a movement. So somebody putting something down, somebody picking something up, maybe somebody getting it, and we apply those timing values to each of those those movements. Is that that the way it works, Sam Woodfield?

SPEAKER_00: 4:43

Yeah, absolutely. So we we have a set of rules that allows us to guide us in the right direction to making certain decisions to stop any uh uh ambiguity about any of our decision making. It takes in a number of variables, what we call influence and factors. So this could be the the distance that we have to reach or reach for an object, or the distance we have to move the object. It also looks at the level of complexity of the grass. It also takes into consideration the difficulty in placing an item, whether it just needs to be placed on a table, or whether there's placing it with precision. So we go through all these, we we take into account all the influence and factors, and that helps us derive a code. That code then gives us a value in TMUs or time and measurement units, and then we can then break that down into a bigger time uh when we add them all together, all the movements together.

SPEAKER_02: 5:38

So yeah. So we we're getting into a significant level of detail then, and not, I assume, something that you can just pick up and and have a go at. There's there is a really clear structured training principle and courses behind this, which are kind of known worldwide. Is that correct, siren?

SPEAKER_00: 5:58

Yeah, absolutely. So what we like to do is everybody must sit at a five-day course that teaches the basics of the MTM fundamental principles, if you like. And then after that, we can then teach them in the building block of choice, whether that be MTM1, MTM2, or UAS or logistics. So the four main ones that we uh deal with here in the UK. Each one of those has its own level of speciality. So depending on what the industry is that you're trying to analyse, will will guide us into the making the right decision as to which is the building block of choice there.

SPEAKER_02: 6:37

Brilliant and we'll we'll touch on this second one in this series on some of those differences between MTM1, two UAS you talked about. And and Ed, as as Simon, you've done the work study training and you've done significant MTM training. How has it kind of changed your thinking about where you'd use stopwatches versus the MTM methodology? Is there industries where it it works better or is more suited?

SPEAKER_01: 7:06

Yeah, so we tend to find MTMs really helpful where you've got a set process that is fairly well adhered to. It doesn't have to be completely adhered to, but you want something that is done and repeatable over a number of cycles, that's where it will really shine. It's not to say that you can't use it for other areas, it just becomes less effective and stopwatchers become more effective. The general rule would be wherever you've got external factors, so customers or other employees, operatives wanting to get people's opinions on things, whether or not more subjectivity to the work, the stopwatch methodologies will be a better indication of how long things take. Whereas if something is highly repetitive, then MTM will be the one that you jump to straight away.

SPEAKER_02: 8:03

And in some instances, you could use a mixture of both to prove what the process looks like in an ideal way versus maybe what's actually happening, so you can see the correlation. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_01: 8:14

Yeah, you can you could do that and see where the method variation is. That's something you can you can definitely use MTM for. What you can also do as well is split various activities down. So for a till transaction, let's say, you might say, well, we'll MTM the inputs that are going into the till, because that's going to be fairly fixed. We will then do the timing for everything that's customer related and use a bit of a hybrid of both to get the detail on system work, but then the variability of the customer interaction.

SPEAKER_02: 8:51

Got it, got it. And and Simon, I suppose key question for people will be so what's the benefit? Why why is this methodology something you might want to learn more about, you might want to use, you might want to use alongside your current studying studying methodology and techniques?

SPEAKER_00: 9:08

Yeah, so it creates fair and consistent standards throughout. What it allows us to also do is produce a business case quite quickly. So if it's as Ed has alluded, it's for high repeatable actions. We can code the now and we then we can go through a number of what if scenarios to look at the various changes that we're we're proposing, and we can come up with a quite quick and easy uh change in times and look at the methods quite critically examine it. So we can look at uh the ergonomic stresses it potentially will change there as well. So it allows us to do this quick and easy without necessarily having to make a huge investment in money to buy um or layout new new work processes and workstations, etc.

SPEAKER_02: 9:59

And with the advancements that have come in daily in AI and augmented reality and VR, all those things kind of play in, and I know you've you've played with some of the technology that's out there, but those things are starting to come through, aren't they, of linking MTM to some of those newer tech technologies and ways of working to synthesize and preview some of those outputs, like you say, without going having to build a whole new factory, for example.

SPEAKER_00: 10:25

Yeah, so um we we deal with the number of software packages currently. So uh there's a number that we can do in VR. So you can ultimately just upload a CAD drawing into your your software, you can act out your motions, get a time quite quickly uh based on the motions, and then if you need to change any of the layouts, bring in new tools, maybe even the items that get fed into the line change because you're looking at um a complete new process change within the factory environments. You can bring all those in into the effect and react out the the process quite quickly, come up with the time standards on those. And there's other other actions. Well, they'll record the motions of the human in real time. So uh motion capture, and that'll be very good to find out what the the walking distances every day that um an operative will do, how far they're reaching, and things like that. That when they're brought in with MTM, will uh again give you time standards. It'll also highlight a lot of non-value added um and as I said earlier, potential ergonomic risks as well. So we can open up a number of uh different variables for you.

SPEAKER_02: 11:38

So significant use of old technology versus new technology, which is really good to understand. And and Ed, just as we close out this this episode before we kind of get more into the detail of how it works in episode two, have you got any closing thoughts in terms of you're probably slightly newer to the MTM world than than Simon Woodfill around benefits again you see?

SPEAKER_01: 12:04

Yeah, I think you can echo what Simon's said. The the fact that you can get you can always get timings off blueprints and layouts before they've even been utilized is a big benefit versus a stopwatch. Being able to break it down into small detailed sort of blocks as well, the data blocks that that make up the coding, all of a sudden you've got a different level you can go to with the observations that you make on a process and the improvements that you can that you can look at in programming or implementing. Where if you are just looking at the stopwatch timing, you don't get that same you you can get closer in some instances with the level of detail, but you can't get to the level of detail plus the method description and the potential alternatives that MTM can be used to highlight. So I think that's where I really see the benefits of it.

SPEAKER_02: 13:01

So that deep dive kind of movement analysis that's really tricky to for a human to observe with a stopwatch because people move so quickly from one thing to the other. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

Exactly. Yeah. You you see it when you're using the stopwatch, but you're too busy timing the operative, you're too busy thinking about the performance rating that you're applying. Whereas in MTM, all of that's taken care of. You look at the video, you're slowing it down, you're looking at the movements, and then you look at the code at the end and say, okay, so how can we do this differently? What can we get rid of? What can we change?

SPEAKER_02: 13:36

Perfect. So I think that leaves us in a good place to pause there for episode one. So we've gone through what MTM is, method time measurement, how it was developed, where you deploy it, where the origins come from, and the benefits. In episode two, we'll have a look at some of the motion categories, some of the differences between the different types of courses that are available and what they'd be used for, and then look a bit a bit further and a bit deeper into some of the rules. But we'll keep it at a high level. If there's some complexity in there, but really important that we kind of convey the message in as simple a way as we can. So we'll pause there. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Ed. We will speak on episode two.

SPEAKER_01: 14:17

Yeah, thank you both.

SPEAKER_02: 14:20

Thank you.