Telesis "...an ancient Greek word signifying the achievement of a steady progress towards an objective through careful planning & the intelligent use of resources"
The learning curve is a formal relationship between the competence of an individual in accomplishing a task and the number of times that person has carried out that task. Thus it reflects the degree to which people learn through repetition.
Applicable to individuals and groups
Whereas this phenomenon can show the relationship between repetition and skill for an individual it is generally applied to industrial processes where several people are involved in different sub-processes applying different technologies with different appropriate techniques and varying skills in their application.
Factor-intensity, the learning curve effect and unit costs
In industrial processes, the more a process is automated (capital-intensive 1) the less the learning curve effect. This is because the "learning" has been embedded into the automation process in the robotic sense as well as, in some systems, in the sense of making use of expert systems for guiding specific process decisions. On the other hand, although the learning effect with each historic doubling in production is less in higher automation systems the automation is in general justified in terms of its achievement of lower unit costs, better consistent quality and faster output than labour-intensive systems.
1 In the case of several automated information systems the overall balance between capital and labour is such as they are not considered to be capital-intensive.
