THE NUMBERS
With Christmas being a time for family and children predominantly believing in Santa Claus, we will go off the numbers for children toys for Christmas with each child having one toy.
UNICEF estimates that there are 2.2 billion children in the world. One news website stated that on a trip to a toy factory in China, that it took roughly 12 minutes to make one toy, the toy in question being a kids light up fire engine.
To produce 2.2 billion toys, with each one taking approximately 12 minutes to make, it would take 24 billion minutes / 400,000,000 hours / 16,666,666.67 days / 2,380,952.38 weeks. This is making the toys one at a time using just one machine for each task.
If we then bear in mind there will be many machines there helping produce toys – to make 100 toys at a time for example purposes – this takes it down to: 240,000,000 minutes / 4,000,000 hours / 166,666.67 days / 23,809.52 weeks
In order to get the process down to a 52 week process, the factory would need to produce 45,788 toys at a time, meaning they would need an exceptionally large workforce. 6 elves are required just to make one toy from admin, design, parts, assembly, quality control and manning the sorting machines. This is without hierarchy / seniority.
With one toy being produced every 12 minutes, the elves on 6 hour shifts to rotate in so there would be no need for breaks, just for toy assembly – a set of 6 elves could process 30 toys per shift. If working Monday to Friday as per the standard Finnish working week, with the factory open from 7am to 1am, rotating with another team of elves – 2 x teams of 6 elves would produce 450 toys a week.
In order to produce the required 45,788 at a time, 274,728 sets of 6 elves would be needed. Remembering that they would not be working non-stop and rotate with another set of elves every other shift, this number doubles to 549,456 elves - the workforce requirement without hierarchy /senior management in the workshop, without worrying about the residential staff requirements, the reindeer handlers and Father Christmas himself.
If we hypothetically added 5% to this number to allow seniors to manage teams of up to 20 elves, this means that without other departments, the final number of elves being managed and controlled in the workshop would be 576,929 – larger than the population of Cape Verde, Malta or Iceland.
The average wage for an industrial worker in Finland is €14 per hour, meaning that if all elves were on the same wage, 30 shifts per month, 360 shifts per year – the annual salary for an elf would be €30,240. Santa would be paying as much as €16,615,549,440 per annum just on salaries – more than the GDP of countries like Jamaica, Albania, Monaco, Montenegro and Barbados. This is multiple times larger than the $262 million Apple paid employees on 2013.
22 | MANE ENGINEERING & MANUFACTURING | DECEMBER 2018