This page is for anyone who needs a garment's whole SMV, not just one operation's. A garment is sewn as a sequence of separate operations, and each operation has its own observed time, rating and allowance. The garment's total SMV is simply the sum of every operation's own SMV in that sequence, calculated the same way for every row.
This matters most to a work-study specialist building a costing base for a whole style, since a line balance, a piece-rate sheet and a costing sheet all need the garment total, not five separate numbers scattered across different documents. Delta Garments' work-study specialist builds this table for Cedar & Co.'s own next domestic production run, the same T-shirt style as Order A, made to stock for Cedar & Co.'s own shops rather than a single confirmed export order.
Without a complete table, a factory has separate, disconnected times for separate operations and no single number a line balance or a costing sheet can actually use. This lesson shows how five already-measured operations become one garment SMV.
You need: lesson 8.1.2's method for building one operation's own SMV from observed time, rating and allowance.
By the end of this lesson you can:
Not covered here: predetermined motion time systems, which build an SMV without a stopwatch (lesson 8.1.4), and how to audit an existing SMV table for errors before trusting it (lesson 8.1.5).
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Operation breakdown | The list of every separate sewing step needed to complete a garment, each assigned to one operator and one machine on the line. |
| Basic time | Observed time adjusted by the rating, giving the time a standard-pace operator would need for the same operation, before any allowance is added. |
| Personal, fatigue and delay allowance (PFDA) | A percentage added to basic time to cover an operator's personal needs, unavoidable fatigue, and short unavoidable delays, turning basic time into a standard minute value. |
| Standard minute value (SMV) | The standard time, in minutes, a trained operator needs to complete one operation on one piece, used to calculate a line's expected output and workload. |
| Rating | A work-study specialist's judgement of how the observed operator's pace compares to a defined standard pace, expressed as a percentage (100% is standard pace). |
Every operation in a garment's breakdown has its own observed time, rating and allowance, because each operation involves different handling, motions and delays. A garment's total SMV adds every operation's own, separately built SMV together. Treating the whole garment as one operation, timed once from start to finish, hides which specific step is slow, fast, or wrongly allowanced.
A person who has only built a table for one simple style should not assume every garment's table looks the same. The rule, adding every operation's own SMV, stays constant; what changes is the table's shape.
| What can differ | The shapes you meet | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A simple garment with few operations | Order A's basic T-shirt has five operations in its breakdown, each with a modest SMV, adding to a total of 2.62 minutes. | A short operation sequence still needs every operation's own SMV added, not a single guessed total. |
| A more complex garment with many operations | A garment with pockets, plackets or multiple panels needs a longer operation breakdown, each row still built the same way. | More rows change the table's length, not the underlying method for building or adding each row. |
| Export orders needing a full table for costing | An export buyer such as Northline Apparel expects the making-charge portion of a quoted FOB price to trace back to a full SMV table, not one round number. | A costing sheet without the underlying table cannot be defended if a buyer questions the making charge. |
| A domestic brand planning its own line's workload | Cedar & Co., producing to its own forecast for its own shops, needs the identical full table to plan how many operators its own domestic run needs, even though no external buyer will audit it. | The table serves internal planning as much as external costing; the method does not change with who reads it. |
Cedar & Co., a domestic Make to Stock brand, is preparing its own next production run at Delta Garments, in the same T-shirt style Order A uses. Before this run starts, Delta Garments' work-study specialist assembles a complete SMV table covering all five operations in the style's breakdown: shoulder join, sleeve attach, neck rib attach, side seam, and hem. Sleeve attach's own SMV of 0.62 minutes, built in lesson 8.1.2, is one row in this larger table.
| Fact | What it tells the work-study specialist |
|---|---|
| Five operations make up the garment's full breakdown | Five separate rows are needed, not one combined figure |
| Sleeve attach's own SMV, 0.62 minutes, is already built | This row can be entered directly; the other four still need their own build-up |
| Neck rib attach involves more handling than the other operations | Its own allowance may reasonably differ from the others, not automatically match them |
| Cedar & Co.'s run is Make to Stock, for its own domestic shops | The table serves Cedar & Co.'s own workforce planning as much as it would serve an export costing sheet |
Building the table once, for the style, serves both Cedar & Co.'s own domestic run and any future export order using the identical operations, since the operations themselves do not change with who is buying the goods.
The worked numberThis example is illustrative, not a claimed fixed academy fact: every observed time, rating and allowance below is a teaching figure, not a measurement of Delta Garments' real line. Each row's basic time is observed time multiplied by rating; each row's SMV is basic time multiplied by one plus its own allowance.
Basic time and SMV for each of Order A's five operations, then the garment's total SMV, 2.62 minutes.
A common mistake is picking one allowance percentage, often the easiest or most familiar figure, and applying it to every operation in the garment without checking whether each operation's own handling actually justifies it. Neck rib attach's extra handling in this lesson's worked number reasonably earns a slightly higher allowance than side seam's single continuous pass. Forcing one allowance across every row either overstates simple operations' SMVs or understates complex ones', and the garment's total SMV inherits both errors at once.
A garment is sewn in separate steps, and each step has its own standard time. To find the whole garment's standard time, you build each step's own time properly, then add every step's time together. You do not time the whole garment once from start to finish and call that the standard. Different steps can fairly have different extra time added for rest and delay, because some steps involve more handling than others. Using one single allowance for every step, without checking, either makes an easy step look harder than it is or a hard step look easier than it is.
Omar, the owner of Cedar & Co., is reviewing the full SMV table for his own next domestic production run before confirming how many operators the run needs. He notices neck rib attach carries a 13% allowance while the other four operations carry 12%, and asks whether this is a mistake in the table.
Omar's message reads:
Should the work-study specialist change neck rib attach's allowance to 12% so every operation in the table matches.
No. Forcing every operation to the same allowance would remove a real difference the time study actually observed, not fix an error.
First, neck rib attach's own handling. This operation genuinely involves more handling steps than shoulder join, sleeve attach, side seam or hem, observed directly during its own time study, not assumed.
Second, what a shared allowance would hide. If every operation were forced to 12%, neck rib attach's SMV would understate its real workload slightly, while the other operations' SMVs would stay accurate; the garment's total SMV would then rest on one operation's understated share.
The work-study specialist should keep neck rib attach's own 13% allowance, and explain to Omar that a full SMV table records each operation's real, observed conditions rather than forcing every row to look identical.
If neck rib attach's allowance were forced down to 12% to match the other operations, its SMV would fall from 0.72 minutes (0.638 × 1.13) to 0.71 minutes (0.638 × 1.12), a 0.01-minute understatement for this one operation.
A 0.01-minute difference on one operation looks small, but across Cedar & Co.'s own production run at the same scale as Order A, 15,000 pieces, it understates the total minutes this one operation needs by 150 minutes (15,000 × 0.01), enough to leave the operator assigned to neck rib attach short of the time the line balance assumed they had, creating a bottleneck that traces back to one forced, inaccurate allowance.
Open the SMV build-up calculator. Enter each of the five operations' own observed time, rating and allowance into their input columns; the basic time and SMV columns calculate automatically for each row, and the total row sums every operation's own SMV into the garment total. Check that no allowance was copied across rows without first checking that operation's own handling.
1. How is a garment's total SMV calculated from its operation breakdown?
2. A garment has three operations with SMVs of 0.30, 0.45 and 0.25 minutes. What is the garment's total SMV?
3. Why might two operations in the same garment fairly carry two different personal, fatigue and delay allowances?
| EN | AR | FR | TR | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operation breakdown | تفصيل العمليات | Décomposition des opérations | Operasyon dökümü | The list of every separate sewing step needed to complete a garment, each assigned to one operator and one machine on the line. |
| Basic time | الزمن الأساسي | Temps de base | Temel süre | Observed time adjusted by the rating, giving the time a standard-pace operator would need for the same operation, before any allowance is added. |
| Personal, fatigue and delay allowance (PFDA) | هامش الشخصي والتعب والتأخير | Marge personnelle, fatigue et délai | Kişisel, yorgunluk ve gecikme payı | A percentage added to basic time to cover an operator's personal needs, unavoidable fatigue, and short unavoidable delays, turning basic time into a standard minute value. |
| Standard minute value (SMV) | قيمة الدقيقة المعيارية (SMV) | Valeur minute standard (SMV) | Standart dakika değeri (SMV) | The standard time, in minutes, a trained operator needs to complete one operation on one piece, used to calculate a line's expected output and workload. |
| Rating | تقييم الأداء | Évaluation d'allure | Derecelendirme | A work-study specialist's judgement of how the observed operator's pace compares to a defined standard pace, expressed as a percentage (100% is standard pace). |
You now know how to add every operation's own SMV into one complete garment total. The next lesson looks at a different way to reach an operation's SMV in the first place, without a stopwatch at all. Back to the course map