Job Production

Job production, sometimes called jobbing or one-off production, involves producing custom work, such as a one-off product for a specific customer or a small batch of work in quantities usually less than those of mass-market products. It is the oldest form of production. Individual products are made, with probably not a lot of standardized parts in it. With batch production and flow production it is one of the three main production methods.

Job production is most often associated with classical craft production, small firms (making railings for a specific house, building/repairing a computer for a specific customer, making flower arrangements for a specific wedding etc.) but large firms use job production too. Examples include:

• Designing and implementing an advertising campaign
• Auditing the accounts of a large public limited company
• Building a new factory
• Installing machinery in a factory
• Machining a batch of parts per a CAD drawing supplied by a customer
• Building the Golden Gate bridge

Fabrication shops and machine shops whose work is primarily of the job production type are often called job shops. The associated people or corporations are sometimes called jobbers.

Job production is, in essence, manufacturing on a contract basis, and thus it forms a subset of the larger field of contract manufacturing. But the latter field also includes, in addition to jobbing, a higher level of outsourcing in which a product-line-owning company entrusts its entire production to a contractor, rather than just outsourcing parts of it.