Disadvantages or Demerits of Office Manuals. The demerits of office manuals are briefly explained below. Preparation and frequent revision of office manuals involves high cost in terms of time, labour and money. It is very difficult to prepare and keep a manual up to date. Labor organizations or workers organize strikes, whereby they take to the streets in solidarity to a common goal. Strikes first came into use during the industrial revolution after mass labor became a common phenomenon due to a change of means of production to factories and mines. Strikes bring about various advantages and disadvantages. It can often take a little longer to express milk than if you use an electric breast pump; It requires a lot more manual labor in terms of keeping a regular pumping motion on your breast while expressing milk. They aren’t always what parents want in terms of ease of use. We have all heard the discussions about manual labor, and the negative perceptions and questions it presents. For instance, people might say it’s bad for your health, or it pays very little, or it causes too much stress. There are several benefits to manual labor though.

Office manuals are highly useful for both the employees and the management. The merits of an office manual are presented below.

Advantages or Merits of Office Manuals

1. An office manager can easily supervise the work of his sub-ordinates and exercise control on them.

2. The need of giving explanation and instructions to existing and new employees is reduced since the manuals are prepared to impart ready information.

3. An office manual is an aid in the training of new employees

since the manuals contain a well established systems, routines and procedures.

4. Doubts of employees can be cleared very easily.

5. Office manuals help in fixing responsibility of employees for non performance of work.

6. Office manual brings uniformity in the performance of work both in the head office and branches.

7. Changes can be very easily incorporated as and when required.

8. Office manual reduces the chances of errors and frauds.

9. The preparation of office manual brings useless work to light so that useless activities are isolated or giving less importance to them.

10. Each employee can understand the extent of authority delegated to him with assignment of job.

11. Office manuals help in detecting overlapping functions and needless duplication of work. In this way, it ensures free flow of work for effective performance.

12. Executives can take quality and timely decisions by referring the instructions and policies of an organization.

13. Greater cooperation among the employees is very easily obtained within a concerned department as well as between departments.

14. Transfer of an employee from one section to another section does not pose any problem to the concerned employee. He can easily pick up his duties in the new location through office manual.

15. Good office manuals lead to reduction of office expenses.

16. It helps in simplifying communication procedure i.e. management Information system

Disadvantages or Demerits of Office Manuals

The demerits of office manuals are briefly explained below

1. Preparation and frequent revision of office manuals involves high cost in terms of time, labour and money.

2. It is very difficult to prepare and keep a manual up to date.

3. Office manual leaves little scope for personal initiative and talents on the part of the executives.

4. Office manuals bring a number of bottlenecks in the effective performance of work instead of bringing free flow of work.

5. Systems, routines or procedures are likely to be misinterpreted if an ambiguous language is used in the preparation of manual.

6. If the manuals are not used by the employees properly in time, human resources and expenses spent on the preparation of manuals will be wasted.

7. It may discourage team spirit among the employees at times.

8. If the manuals are not revised at frequent intervals or periodically, they became outdated.

9. Sometimes inadequate or incomplete or vague information may be given in the manuals.

In Business, production generally has two techniques;

• Labour Intensive Production aims to use a large workforce to complete work by hand, this usually employs a lot of people to create a product. Some products may be seen to have more value if they were manufactured by hand.
• Capital Intensive Production aims to create a product using as little people as possible, the process could be entirely or partially automated and can sometimes be used to assist individuals in manufacture, such as a custom robotic factory worker that moves parts of a product to assembly, or a robot that screws in multiple screws at once. The aim of these tools is to make the job simple or quicker than manual labour, in order to product multiple product in a given time. Production machinery may be very expensive, but aims to be cheaper than labour intensive production in the long run.

Labour Intensive Production

Labour costs are higher than capital intensive production, however they can vary. If the task is simple then automation may not be necessary. Labour Intensive production will generally have lower running cost than capital intensive production, as workers will perform most of the tasks. Firms can benifit from access to low-cost labour as the job will likely be low skilled.

• Businesses can benefit from premium pricing for ‘hand crafted’ goods.
• There is generally better quality if it is not a fast process.
• Labour costs can be lower if businesses hire on temporary contracts. Individuals will not need to operate specialised machinery.
• Some businesses can use a flexible workforce to make sure that locations are staffed efficiently.
• Labour Intensive production allows for improvement easily compared to capital intensive production.
• Observation is easier.
• Lower Break-even output.
• Labour intensive production is often associated with low tech repetative processes.

Capital Intensive Production

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Manual Labour Department

• There is generally a better consistency than manual labour.
• Businesses can loose competitiveness as they are stuck in the same production technique.
• Machinery may become obsolete.
• You can’t make businesses such as a restaurant or hotel capital intensive as customers may feel that their stay was devalued by it.
• May generate resistance from labour workforce when implementing.
• Kanban systems are easier to implement.
• There may be a greater loss if there is a fault.
• Programmed machines do not loose skill and there is no skill shortage for machines.
• Potentially High labour costs if individuals need to maintain complex machines.
• Firms can benefit from access to long term financing.
• Labour is more specialised so individuals are good at their job.
• There is usually longer term benefits.
• Robots do not require pay.
• Costs are mainly fixed.
• There is therefore usually a higher break-even output.