the work measurement concept has evolved from the manufacturing world but has not been fully adopted yet to the global shift to the service sector. certain factors create inherent difficulties in determining standard times for labor allocation in service jobs: (a) wide variation in time between arrivals and service performance time; (b) the difficulty of assessing the damage done to the organization by long customer waiting times for service. this difficulty makes it hard to calculate the break-even point between raising worker output, which minimizes labor costs but increases customer waiting times and reduces service quality.