Traditional time studies are essential and expensive. An industrial engineer with a stopwatch and a clipboard spends days on the floor to study a single process. The data is subjective — influenced by observer presence (the Hawthorne effect), operator selection, and measurement technique. The sample size is small — typically 10-30 observations. And by the time the study is completed, analyzed, and documented, the process may have already changed. This creates a capacity bottleneck. Most plants have more processes that need study than IE hours available to study them. According to the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), a typical manual time study requires 2-3 days of dedicated IE time per process, including observation, analysis, and documentation. For a plant with 50 distinct processes, maintaining current time studies would require 100-150 IE days per year — roughly 40-60% of one full-time engineer's capacity, dedicated solely to measurement. Standard work documentation falls behind actual practice. Line balancing decisions are made on outdated cycle time data. And the gap between documented standards and floor reality grows wider over time. When the IE team is asked why standard work is outdated, the honest answer is: they do not have enough hours to keep it current. The constraint is not a lack of methodology. It is the labor intensity of the method itself. When a time study requires 2-3 days of dedicated IE time per process, most processes simply never get studied with adequate frequency.