What is ‘Idle Time’
Idle time is unproductive time on the part of employees or machines as a result of factors beyond their control. Idle time is the time associated with waiting, or when a piece of machinery is not being used but could be. Idle time could also be associated with computing, and in that case refers to processing time.
Explaining ‘Idle Time’
Time management is extremely important in any business. This includes timing the completion of one project to coordinate with the beginning of another to reduce idle time. For example, if department A is unable to work on assembly because department B has not finished creating the parts required, the two departments need to be synchronized so that this handoff can go more smoothly, thus reducing idle time.
Further Reading
- Aggregate demand, idle time, and unemployment – academic.oup.com [PDF]
- Financial analysts' forecasts of earnings: Their value to investors – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Endogenous money creation and idle balances – books.google.com [PDF]
- Multi-agent job shop scheduling system based on co-operative approach of idle time minimisation – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- The effect of idle time thresholds on computer use time estimations by electronic monitoring – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- The economics of idle public funds policies: a reconsideration – www.jstor.org [PDF]
- Accounting for idle capacity cost in the scheduling of economic lot sizes – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- A new Nawaz–Enscore–Ham-based heuristic for permutation flow-shop problems with bicriteria of makespan and machine idle time – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
