What Is a Learning Curve?
Most organizations learn and improve over time. As firms and employees perform a task over and over, they learn how to perform more efficiently. This means that task times and costs decrease.
Learning curves are based on the premise that people and organizations become better at their tasks as the tasks are repeated. A learning curve graph (illustrated in Figure E.1) displays cost (or time) per unit versus the cumulative number of units produced. From it we see that the time needed to produce a unit decreases, usually following a negative exponential curve (part a), as the person or company produces more units. In other words, it takes less time to complete each additional unit a firm produces. However, we also see in ...
Get Operations Management: Sustainability and Supply Chain Management, Twelfth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
