Taylor

BY JOE FLYNN

to TQM

Part I:

100 Years of Production Management

BY JOE FLYNN

hen IIE convened at Banff for the annual conference last May, the date was almost 100 years to the day since Frederick Winslow Taylor joined the Bethlehem Steel Co. In his four years at Bethlehem, Taylor would put a fine finish on what, a decade later, came to be known as scientific management. Over the years, I have become something of a Taylor historian. I have read a few of the dozens of Taylor biographies and have spent many hours in the Taylor library at Stevens Institute checking Taylors correspondence and notes to better understand one point or another on the origins of work measurement and of human engineering. At Banff, in celebration of IIEs 50th anniversary, a number of profiles were presented about the people who originated industrial engineering. I was disappointed by the paucity of Taylor coverage in the display but then was shocked to find that so few of my fellow IEs knew anything at all about the man and his truly magnificent contributions to human progress. To fix this, I thought it might be helpful (and a bit of fun) to spend some ink describing a few of Taylors discoveries and how industry has used them over the past century. The editor of IIE Solutions liked the idea and suggested that we begin with a review of Taylors work specific to the topic of production control. In the beginning, the task seemed simple. First, make a list of the mans accomplishments. Last, select those that

dation of industrial engineering. Today, successful management of production is impossible without the use of numbers and a significant ability to crunch, distribute, and understand them. To the contrary, much of service enterprise seems to be able to muddle through with cheerleading, body English, and an active public relations staff. The second problem has more to do with fate than with management. My father had a favorite epigram that he repeated probably 20 times for me as I grew up. Im sure he didnt invent it because he always used that tone of voice (the one that indicated he was quoting someone): When preparedness meets opportunity, thats luck. By that standard, Frederick Winslow Taylor was surely one of the luckiest men who ever lived. As we trace his saga, time and again we find instances where some unnecessary, at times even frivolous, act prepared him in a way that permitted a major achievement a month, a year, or a decade later. As for the other side of the equation, new opportunities came in droves because he was lucky with his old opportunities. I believe that it is almost impossible to truly grasp the quantity and the breadth of his accomplishments without knowing all the elements of the saga. It seemed clear that the only effective approach would be to work in sequence, from beginning to end. Fortunately, practical considerations require me to skip some things. Unfortunately, its necessary to fill in others with more detail than they probably deserve.

Taylors systems introduced quantitative methods: the science in scientific management and the foundation of industrial engineering. Today, successful management of production is impossible without the use of numbers and a significant ability to crunch, distribute, and understand them.
had a bearing on production operations engineering and write about them. Then the problems emerged. As a starter, to focus on production operations engineering is to focus on almost everything of importance in manufacturing management. In Taylors day, manufacturing and distribution were the body and the pulse of industry, and it is pretty much the same today. This is true especially in the way management is performed. Taylors systems introduced quantitative methods: the science in scientific management and the founLeft, F.W. Taylor inspecting concrete work.

The saga began in the early 1880s at Midvale Steel Co. in Philadelphia with Taylors development of work measurement and ended in 1899 with his discovery of high-speed steel at Bethlehem Steel, about 50 miles away. The 15 years that remained to him after the start of the new century were spent consolidating, developing, communicating, and defending what had come in the two decades before. Maybe its a bit dramatic, but I visualize Taylors projects of discovery as a series of battlessome small in effort and

short, others energetic and protracted, aimed at clarifying the unknown. Taylor would arm himself with all the weapons developed on past sorties, regardless of how poorly suited they seemed to the new enemy and the new terrain. He would hire mercenaries to help with the battle, but shower them with medals and parade their achievements, and also share their glory. After all, he had decided when and where to fight. I picture a sortie of discovery followed by a withdrawal while ideas From the earliest of times, it has been clear that the great weakness of time study is in the need for an anawere consolidated and lyst to arbitrarily rate and operators performance. some other intervention planned. Then, perhaps, another sortie into the same region. on quickly, and soldiering was invented. Soldiering was a Always, the objective was to increase what we today call pro- practice by which the workers would agree on a common ductivity and what in Taylors day industrialists called effi- work pace, like soldiers on parade. The pace was arbitrary ciency. The idea of efficiency-productivity is different now . . . and often yielded about half the production rate that was but Im getting ahead of the story. achievable. Incentive bonus be damned! Is soldiering still around today? Only anywhere a production incentive is Sortie #1: work measurement used to determine a standard rate. Work measurement was the foundation of the theory of sciTaylors method of observation and timing involved all entific management as well as its primary tool. From the the trappings of modern science. Expensive instruments first days of the industrial revolution, management, from and preprinted notepads were used. Observations were the foreman to the owner, needed to know how much a made with amazing precisiona thousandth of a minute in machine could produce. The machine might be a giant some cases. The analysts were very knowledgeable (all colforging hammer or a man at a forge. It might be an entire lege graduates, of course). They would actually get down factory, or a mine, or a room full of clerks. In addition, each on the production floor with the workers. They even challevel of management needed to know the answer in a diflenged the methods at times (although they didnt yet ferent form because each would put the information to a change them). Their skill was so great that they could tell different use. Before Taylor, the approach was: just by watching the workers in motion exactly how hard Put the men to work. Foreman, keep them working and dont they were working and could adjust a standard accordingly. let them slack off. Now, watch and see how much they turn out in The workers seldom shared this bosss-eye-view of what a week. You can expect that this will be about what the machine or was going on, but they could only vote with their feet. the plant (or whatever youre watching) can produce and you can Much of the great successes of Taylors original method call it the weekly production rate. came from features that he probably didnt realize were This could be called the accountants method of establish- there. When these features were developed out of the ing standards. It is in common use even today. method, it became less tractable and the analysts concluWhats that, mister foreman? You say you cant watch everysions much less defensible. The trappings were as imporone all the time, and when you turn away they slack off? Well, tant as the data. Having an expert do the study made instead of hiring more foremen (which can get expensive and is everyone take it seriously. An analyst who could speak not how we want to use our foremen, anyway), lets pay the work- knowledgeably with the operator about the process as well ers extra to produce as much as they can. How much is that? as his performance might even be able to improve the work. Well, well let them tell us. How much should we pay? Enough to These issues duly noted, the original time studys proceget their attention. But remember, once they show us what they dure was the systems most important asset. can do, then well know. Now, workers are morally obligated to us By the end of the second year of development at Midvale, to produce as much as they can, and we dont have any obligation Taylors method of time study had come to incorporate proto pay them a bonus for an effort they owe us anyway. The stancedures that implemented most of the basic principles of dards have to keep in step with what the workers have demontodays practice of work measurement. In developing his strated they can do! protocol, Taylor worked essentially from scratch and, for Of course, by Puritan standards this approach is ethical, his insights, drew on what appears to be an innate sense of but it certainly is not practical. Workers everywhere caught physical order. Many features of the protocol can be seen to

answer specific needs dictated by one or more of these principles, although the principles, at the time, had not been identified. For example: A standard time should only include the time an operator is actually working on the product, was satisfied by the invention of elements. In doing a time study, it is easy to recognize and simply discount the time the operator is waiting for the opportunity to work but harder to separate out unnecessary activities. To make it easier to identify what should be counted, Taylor compartmentalized the productive activities into elements. For each job, elements were defined in such a way that activity within the element could not easily be interrupted. Not only did this procedure assist with time study, it also made it possible (and desirable) to produce detailed process descriptions. Taylor put these descriptions to good use as he developed the production planning activity. The concept of elemental analysis was also the key to the development of standard data. If elements are properly designed, it is possible to determine a standard for the process by describing the process in terms of pre-rated elements. Only those elements that have not been rated need to be time studied. Taylor introduced handbook engineering to industrial management when, in the mid-1890s, he engaged Sanford Thompson, a recent MIT graduate, to develop a series of manuals of standard data for the building trades. Thompson performed the early time studies himself and, if you follow his correspondence with Taylor, you can see the time study protocol developing in richness. Thompsons connection with the building trades and his base in Boston

are probably what first attracted Frank Gilbreth to Taylors methods and brought him into Taylors fold. (A note related to Thompsons effort is that Taylor could be said to have invented the snapback stopwatch. Actually, he wrote a set of detailed stopwatch specifications that Thompson was about to have implemented when Thompson stumbled across a watch at an obscure watchmakers shop in the Boston area. It exactly met Taylors specifications. Taylor and his group bought many of these over the years, and it is the standard watch for time study even to this day.) One application of elemental analysis that never occurred is the one for which scientific management is most frequently criticized. Neither Taylor nor any of his disciples (including Frank Gilbreth) ever attempted to assign different people to tasks described among the elements of a single-operator process. Scientific management never sought to break jobs down to the unchallenging, short-cycle-time procedures that the critics of the 1930s and beyond found so dehumanizing. Taylor didnt do it, Henry Ford did. But more about this later. From the earliest times, it has been clear that the great weakness of time study is in the need for an analyst to arbitrarily rate an operators performance. In 1884, Taylor hit upon an incentive scheme he called the differential rate system. This (we can see with hindsight) actually established a platform of validity for the results of the time study procedure. Taylors primary objective in doing a time study was to establish an appropriate production rate to use as a basis for an incentive payment. All other applications of time study

ment in which a worker could take pride. Also, in Taylors system, the company would want to pay the incentive. People would be employed to teach all the workers a proper method that would enable them to work at the first-class level. The differential rate system was never popular for a number of reasons having more to do with the nature of industrial processes than the nature of human operators. Without it, time study procedure devolved to a level that saw analysts reporting standards to one-hunA differential rate system provided a psychological boost to workers who would be paid a premium for sustained high-level performance. dredth of a minute after applying a 70 or 130 perinformation were by-products. Taylors time study procecent arbitrary performance rating and stating that they dure had the analyst select one of the observed times for each could be 95 percent certain that a standard experienced element as the representative time. The selected time was not operator would perform within 5 percent of that standard. originally intended by Taylor to be an average of all observed The need to identify and measure the first-class worker times, as it soon became. Of course, the time the analyst was a heavy burden on the early practitioners. After selected was likely to be the shortest time of all. And why Taylors death it caused a rift in the cadre of disciples, with not? The operator had demonstrated he could do the element Frank Gilbreth and a number of colleagues focused on in that time. Also, the analyst had been careful to select a per- methods, while the rest stuck with time study. The differenson to study who was likely to offer a first-class performance. tial rate incentive system is probably not practiced anyThe result was that the process cycle time, the sum of all where today and, I am told, is forbidden by labor law in these shortest element times, would probably be a value many countries. Of course, we should note that Taylor, the near the shortest time that the very best and most enthusiergonomist, invented a golf putter that is so successful it is astic operator could do the job. Under these circumstances, banned from record play. the standard rate would be near the maximum attainable It wasnt until the 1930s that the next step in developand not very useful in spurring a mediocre performer to a ment of standard data took place. A number of systems performance that was only slightly better than average. The were developed that built on (the late) Frank Gilbreths analyst would be forced to assign a performance rating technique of micromotion study. These systems permitted much greater than 150 percent to establish the time for a calculation of a standard from a very detailed description of standard experienced operator working with good skill the process. Detail is at the level of a movement of a single and effort. Taylors solution was to offer incentives only for body parta finger or a hand. These are known as systems performance at the level of the first-class person. There of predetermined times and include, among others, MTM, would be no incentive pay at all for the days production if work factor, and their derivatives. The computer has had it amounted to even one piece less than first-class perforlittle effect on work measurement except that we now use a mance. There was no interest in establishing a rate for the lot of digital stopwatches. mediocre operator. All this meant that the time study could stand unadjusted and this maximum rate would be definiSortie #2: production planning tive for the process. In the beginning, there was no real production planning. A A worker could make serious money on the differential foreman would simply tell an operator what part to make rate system because the company would pay 150 percent or and how many. The operator would then pull the approprimore of day rate on the entire days production. Since ate specs (perhaps a drawing or sketch), tools and materiactual production would be more than doubled and als, set up the machine, then start production. For many because labor costs were, even then, a small portion of total jobs, the worker was expected to supply his own tools. If costs for a piece, the company would do very well indeed. the operator had questions, he could discuss the job with The company could never raise the standard because it was the foreman before starting work. Usually, he wouldnt. defined and scientifically established at the maximum posTaylors system of production planning was based on a sible rate. Psychologically, the system was ideal because it description of every job, which was entered on a card as offered incentive only for a sustained high-level perforpart of documenting the time study. Each card not only carmance for an entire day. This would be a real accomplishried a detailed description of the task in the form of a listing

of the elements and the standard time for each element, but also the machine settings, materials and tools required, and a sketch of the part to be made. A planner need only gather all the cards associated with a reorder of a product, assemble the appropriate worksheets, order the required materials, schedule individual machines (but not the operators), alert the tool room of production needs, and prepare a detailed work schedule. Note that this was 70 years BX (before Xerox) and just about the time the typewriter came into common use in business. Many copies of each card had to be made by hand. Carbon paper didnt work with card stock, and paper wouldnt hold up on the shop floor. Elaborate filing systems had to be developed to keep track of everything. Then, as now, a misfiled card was lost forever. Part-numbering systems were developed by Taylor to supply file keys. Building a production planning system provided Taylor with much of the method of the cost accounting system he would develop in the 1890s. Taylors production planning system may seem to be rather rudimentary to us at the end of the 20th century. Its most revolutionary components are now clearly seen to be obvious. Nevertheless, no one has been successful in developing a production planning system that truly dispenses with the process description or the method of observation and timing that produces it. This is unfortunate. Time and again the infrastructure required to establish and maintain this type of system has been found to be almost impossible to sustain. The scheduling process cannot begin until all the jobs likely to run have been analyzed, and an analyst cannot

produce this kind of detail without actually observing the job in progress. A complete analysis project is a long and expensive affair and no returns are available until it is completed. The few installations that Taylor was able to complete worked spectacularly well, but most were never finished. Unless rigid maintenance policies were in place, even the well-installed system deteriorated and then collapsed. In 1913, when Taylors methods were just beginning to receive wide acceptance, Ford Harris showed a way to answer the fundamental question of production planning. The question is, How large must the production lot size be to justify the time spent on setup? Economic order quantity (EOQ), probably the first mathematical optimization model applied to business, showed tremendous promise. Unfortunately, a planner needed good information on setup time and process run time to perform the analysis. Without time study data, planners were stopped because standards developed by the accountants method couldnt separate set-up and run time. Eventually, standards developed to support incentive systems became available and the method was widely used. We still use it today but not very enthusiastically. After all, 1913 was a long time ago and industry then was very different. MRP was introduced in the 1960s as the great computer hope for production planning. Joe Orlicky and Ollie Wight and the other developers of MRP were faced with an interesting problem: How can you plan production if you dont know how long each job should take to make, and how do you determine how long it should take without studying

the job? Furthermore, when process information at the level required is available, it must be on the computer to be useful. But it would be tremendously expensive to put it on, given the 1960s cost of memory. As a solution, they came up with the concept of estimated lead times and infinite capacity. In short: We just wont ask those questions. Then they limited the problem to one of predicting materials requirements (what had to be ordered from the outside), and they were safe. But industry wanted production planning for the shop, so the wand was waved. Materials requirements became manufacturing resources, the technique was applied where it didnt belong, and we spent 20 years trying to get 98 percent inventory accuracy while explaining why MRP wasnt working for us. The practice of production planning has grown in a rather strange manner over the century. We try to find the best information we can get without actually going down and looking at the process or the product or the people at work. Then we analyze it to a pulp and wave our conclusions proudly for all to see and use. Then we complain bitterly that nobody is using our plan. Production plannings 35 years of experience with the computer doesnt seem to have helped much. Perhaps the pulp is a bit finer. Sortie #3: production control While production control and production planning are usually spoken in the same breath, production control can proceed very competently without any effective production planning at the process level. Production control boils down to determining if a process that is operating is running at the proper rate and, if the process is stopped, to finding out if it should be running. In either case, if things are not as they should be, we fix them, and that is production control. A bad product is the same as a machine stopped for the time necessary to make the product, so quality is also an issue. Taylors methods fixed the first contingency by ensuring that everyone knew what the proper operating rate was for each job and by securing a commitment to meet the rate. He fixed the second contingency by systematically removing the reasons for downtime. Production planning could help, of course, if a system was available. Taylor promoted management practices as part of his system that anticipated discoveries of the 1970s and later. Among the policies he advocated: tools would be supplied by the shop; more important, they would be maintained by the shop. The best tools that could be had would be used at every level. All machines would be kept fully operational by an effort of every person in the shop. Persons would be employed to train every operator in the proper method of that process. In many ways, Taylor anticipated by 100 years many of the features of the SMED (single-minute exchange of die) protocol. Taylors approach, at the time it was developed in the 1880s at Midvale, was applicable to all of manufacturing. Then, in 1913, 30 years after Taylor installed his first system, a revolution in manufacturing occurred: Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. The assembly line vastly simplified production control to the extent that much of the Taylor protocol was inappropriate to this kind of flow shop manufacturing process. In brief, the assembly line runs at a constant rate (feet per minute). Products, therefore, come off the end of the line at

a constant production rate (units per hour). Each job on the line must be completed in an amount of time commensurate with this production rate. If the line is producing 60 units per hour, then no individual job can require more than a minute to complete. There are qualifications to and ways around these statements, but this is essentially the situation. In planning a line speed (which is the only kind of production planning possible for the line itself), we must recognize that the line can only run at a speed determined by the longest process time. If that worker is operating near 100 percent of capacity, then all other workers must be underutilized in that they must wait for the line to move on. To minimize underutilization of the workers, it is important to balance the line. This means that elements of jobs must be assembled in such a way that all individual jobs take about the same amount of total process time. While it is important to know how much time each element should require, traditional time study techniques are not appropriate for engineering an assembly line. In addition, individual incentives are not appropriate since every operator is tied to a rigid maximum production rate. Finishing an operation a few seconds early benefits no one. With a fast line, operations are so short that no worker can take much pride in performance. Here we find the dehumanizing lack of richness in the work that has traditionally been blamed on scientific management. Routine became such a problem among Fords workers that, in the first year of full assembly line operation, the company experienced about 900 percent turnover. Ford countered by increasing wages to a flat $5 a day for all production workers. This was about double what anyone could make anywhere else. It stopped the turnover, made going to work for Ford a coup, and made Ford himself a hero. Nevertheless, there were many applications for time study and the rest of Taylors discoveries in automobile factories, including Fords, and all the rest of industry as well. Coming up The conclusion of this feature appears in the November issue. In the next installment: Sortie #4: chip cutting and how its done Sortie #5: cost accounting Sortie #6: ergonomics and human engineering Sortie#7: quality control and why a Model T had to be painted black. For further reading Kanigel, Robert, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, Viking, 1997. Joe Flynn, Ph.D., P.E., is an associate professor of engineering at The College of New Jersey, Trenton. He is a senior member of IIE and chairs the Production and Inventory Control Interest Group.