New. Popular E-Book on IE,
Introduction to Modern Industrial Engineering. #FREE #Download.
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https://academia.edu/103626052/INTRODUCTION_TO_MODERN_INDUSTRIAL_ENGINEERING_Version_3_0
New. Popular E-Book on IE,
Introduction to Modern Industrial Engineering. #FREE #Download.
In 0.1% on Academia.edu. 11600+ Downloads so far.
https://academia.edu/103626052/INTRODUCTION_TO_MODERN_INDUSTRIAL_ENGINEERING_Version_3_0
Online Education/Training Session on "Effective Industrial Engineering and Productivity Management."
I developed an online education/training session on "Effective Industrial Engineering and Productivity Management." I can present the session in one hour, one and half hour or two-hour long sessions. The sessions will be valuable when company industrial engineers and other engineers and managers attend as a group. Industrial engineers require active cooperation and participation of other engineers and managers in their studies and projects. Hence a common presentation and discussion on effectiveness will be very useful.
Supporting Information.
Effective Industrial Engineering - Some Thoughts by Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
Effective industrial engineering has to satisfy management about the contribution it made to the organization year after year.
The prime contribution of IE has to be cost reduction through productivity improvement.
https://nraoiekc.blogspot.com/2025/07/effective-industrial-engineering-some.html
Online Free Access Handbook of Industrial Engineering includes all modules of IE Online Course Notes.
I developed an online education/training session on "Effective Industrial Engineering and Productivity Management." I can present the session in one hour, one and half hour or two-hour long sessions. The sessions will be valuable when company industrial engineers and other engineers and managers attend as a group. Industrial engineers require active cooperation and participation of other engineers and managers in their studies and projects. Hence a common presentation and discussion on effectiveness will be very useful.
Supporting Information.
Effective Industrial Engineering - Some Thoughts by Narayana Rao K.V.S.S.
Effective industrial engineering has to satisfy management about the contribution it made to the organization year after year.
The prime contribution of IE has to be cost reduction through productivity improvement.
https://nraoiekc.blogspot.com/2025/07/effective-industrial-engineering-some.html
Lesson 29 of Industrial Engineering ONLINE Course - IE Concepts Module - Contribution of Taylor, Gilbreth, Emerson, Maynard, Barnes, Shigeo Shingo.
Harrington Emerson contributed to the systems efficiency focus of industrial engineering. His book Twelve Principles of Efficiency was classic.
Harrington Emerson contributed to the systems efficiency focus of industrial engineering. His book Twelve Principles of Efficiency was classic.
He discussed efficiency design of organization through 12 principles. We can see that Emerson's focus is on efficiency management or productivity management. We can today say his principles are 12 principles of productivity management (See Principles of Industrial Engineering, 2017).
Harrington Emerson - Twelve Principles of Efficiency - Productivity Management
1. Clearly defined ideals.
2. Common sense
3. Competent counsel
4. Discipline
5. The fair deal
6. Reliable, immediate and adequate records
7. Despatching
8. Standards and schedules
9. Standardized conditions
10. Standardized operations
11. Written standard-practice instructions
12. Efficiency-reward
2. Common sense
3. Competent counsel
4. Discipline
5. The fair deal
6. Reliable, immediate and adequate records
7. Despatching
8. Standards and schedules
9. Standardized conditions
10. Standardized operations
11. Written standard-practice instructions
12. Efficiency-reward
1. Clearly defined ideals.
Every organization must have defined ideals that align its employees and guide their behavior. We are today using the terms, objectives, goal, mission, purpose, value etc. for the term ideals used by Emerson.
2. Common sense
Emerson talks of higher level understanding of persons in higher levels of management to promote efficiency.
3. Competent counsel
Efficiency improvement is a specialized knowledge area, and companies have to appoint specialists to develop the efficiency develop function in the organization and take their help in announcing programs and practices.
4. Discipline
The organization has to make plans and run its operations according to the plan.
5. The fair deal
In the organization, every body must perceive fairness in dealings.
Reliable records are required for good plans including good efficiency plans.
7. Despatching
What is to be done at each machine needs to be determined by planning department and is to be communicate to the workman.
There needs to be a schedule planned for each machine and operator in the organization based on customer deliveries promised and the associated criteria. Standard times for doing various operations are to be developed to help in developing schedules.
In the organization all facilities and environmental conditions have to be planned to meet specified objectives. A planned facility is termed standard facility.
The movements of machine components, the motions of operators, the transport and handling of materials are to be planned to meet specified objectives.
Standardized conditions and standardized operations are communicated to concerned persons in the organization through standard practice instructions. The efficiency expected will come about only when all activities are performed as per standard practice instructions.
Efficiency improvement has to result in benefit to all involved to sustain it. Employees have to receive efficiency reward as the efficiency in organization goes and the financial benefits are realized.
Standards and standardization as a basis for efficiency was strongly advocated by him. Nearly two hundred companies adopted various features of the Emerson Efficiency system, which included production routing procedures, standardized working conditions and tasks, time and motion studies, and a bonus plan which raised workers' wages in accordance with greater efficiency and productivity [Guide].
Harrington Emerson (1853-1931) was one of America's pioneers in industrial engineering and management and organizational theory. His major contributions were to install his management methods at many industrial firms and to promote the ideas of scientific management and efficiency to a mass audience [Guide].
Emerson was born on August 2, 1853 in Trenton, New Jersey. From 1862 to 1876 he studied under tutors and attended private schools in England, France, Italy, and Greece. In addition to learning languages and archaeology, he attended engineering classes in the Royal Bavarian Polytechnique from 1872 to 1875. Emerson returned to the U.S. in 1876 and acquired a position as Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nebraska.
After a successful tenure as a general manager of a small Pennsylvania glass factory in 1900, Emerson resolved to take up efficiency engineering as a profession. Through meetings of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he became personally acquainted with the pioneering work of Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, and assimilated much of the methodology for standardizing work and remunerating workers in accordance with productivity.
Emerson's most notable consulting assignment was the reorganization of the machine and locomotive repair shops of the sprawling Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. Three years in duration (1904-1907), this work involved the first successful application of scientific management to a large railroad system. Engineering and railroad periodicals gave much attention to the system of "shop betterment" which he installed. Emerson also developed and implemented a bonus pay system which was widely accepted in a number of industries. As a result of his successful work for the Atchison, Topeka, Emerson began to attract an industrial clientele. During his tenure as a Standard Practice Engineer for the American Locomotive Company, Emerson also founded the Emerson Company. This company hired out associate consulting engineers to other firms on a contract basis. Emerson associates were entrusted with the tasks of standardizing work procedures and applying the Emerson bonus plan for client companies.
Between 1907 and 1910, the Emerson Company consulted over 200 corporations, submitting reports for which they were paid twenty-five million dollars. Emerson efficiency methods were applied to department stores, hospitals, colleges, and municipal governments. Between 1911 and 1920 Emerson's firm averaged annual earnings of over $100,000.00.
Emerson also published number of books like Taylor and Gilbreth to promote systems and efficiency. Emerson published three books: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages (1909); The Twelve Principles of Efficiency (1912); and Colonel Schoonmaker and the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (1913).
Emerson also published number of books like Taylor and Gilbreth to promote systems and efficiency. Emerson published three books: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages (1909); The Twelve Principles of Efficiency (1912); and Colonel Schoonmaker and the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad (1913).
The 1910 Eastern Freight Case brought much wider public attention to Emerson's ideas. Emerson served as Louis D. Brandeis's star witness in the appeal of major eastern trunk railroads to the Interstate Commerce Commission for a rate increase. Emerson testified that the railroads wasted one million dollars daily by not applying efficiency methods. His brief against the railroads won wide acclaim and marked the growth in public awareness of scientific management. Emerson became known as the "High Priest of Efficiency." He spoke more frequently about his efficiency ideas to businessmen, civil organizations, and management and engineering students. In 1912, Emerson helped to found the New York Efficiency Society which promoted and disseminated the ideals of reform through scientific management. Emerson joined other progressive engineers in founding the Society of Industrial Engineers in 1917.
Through the decade of the 1920s, Emerson publicized the potential for promoting efficiency on a global scale. He was one of eighteen prominent engineers chosen by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1921 to serve on a committee investigating the elimination of waste in industry.
Emerson was an efficiency educator also. In 1924, he re-wrote and marketed an earlier version of a correspondence course in human engineering. Under the aegis of the Emerson Institute, Emerson's home study course in personal efficiency had a nationwide subscription of 40,000 in 1925. Up to his death in May, 1931, he documented his contributions to scientific management and industrial engineering in his manuscript autobiography, in essays, and in personal letters.
Emerson documents are available in Pennsylvania State University Library. http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/FindingAids/emerson.frame.html for reference.
Sources:
Guide to Emerson, http://www.libraries.psu.edu/speccolls/FindingAids/emerson.frame.html
Access the books by Emerson from Archive.org
"Efficiency like hygiene is a state, an ideal not a method" P.23
Strenuousness and efficiency are not only not the same, but are antagonistic. To be strenuous is to put forth greater effort; to be efficient it to put forth less effort. (P.39)
"He did not know that efficiency reward ought to be preceded by the careful, systematic, and expert application of eleven other principles, of which "Wages" is a minor element of one." P.41
Access the books by Emerson from Archive.org
The Twelve Principles of Efficiency (1912)
Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages
Articles by Emerson in Scientific American
Quotations by Harrington Emerson
It is not true that a machine permanently displaces a man; it promotes him, but it is the duty of corporations and of the State to make the period of transition easy, not one of temporary hardship. [p. x]
It is not labor, not capital, not land, that has created modern wealth or is creating it today. It is ideas that create wealth, and what is wanted is more ideas more uncovering of natural reservoirs, and less labor and capital and land per unit of production. [p. x]
"The twentieth century dawns with as yet unaccomplished task of conservation, of eliminating wastes-wanton and wicked wastes of all kinds, wastes that make our civic governments a by-word, our destruction of natural resources a world scandal, our complacent industrial efficiency a peculiarly national disgrace, of all nations, we Americans ought to know better."
[ The Twelve Principles of Efficiency (1912) P.9]"Efficiency like hygiene is a state, an ideal not a method" P.23
Strenuousness and efficiency are not only not the same, but are antagonistic. To be strenuous is to put forth greater effort; to be efficient it to put forth less effort. (P.39)
"He did not know that efficiency reward ought to be preceded by the careful, systematic, and expert application of eleven other principles, of which "Wages" is a minor element of one." P.41
Accounting in all its phases is a minor division of one of the twelve efficiency principles, trustworthy, immediate and adequate records. P.43
An efficiency engineer ought similarly to act as funnel, being equipped to gather from all available sources whatever is of operating value for the organization he is advising. P.54
If all the ideals animating all the organization from top to bottom could be lined so as to pull in the same straight line, the resultant would be a very powerful effort. P.60
The railway line between st. Petersburg and Moscow cost $337,000 a mile for a distance of 400 miles. In Finland similar line was made for $23,000 a mile P. 65 (Sentence rewritten)
The ideas of one company are that its customers shall be treated with absolute fairness, that its employees shall be of higher skill and be better paid than those of neighboring competitors, that they shall have permanence of employment.P.84
There are only a dozen shops in the United States in which any scientific standards of man and machine efficiency exist. P.111
The legal counselor does not, cannot know all the laws and proper legal formalities in every state, and he therefore employs junior and often senior counsel. Similarly a counselor as to efficiency, would not pretend to be expert as to all efficiency, but it would be his duty to be in touch both as to men and scientific reports with all that was latest and best and make it all available for his employer whether individual or corporation. P.129
There is nothing men will not attempt when great enterprises hold out the promise of great rewards. - Livy
Out of eighteen items of operating costs, as distinguished from selling costs, only one is directly influenced by the worker, that is time-quality of the work. P.355
Efficiency reward is not a money payment, this is only one of its myriad forms. Men have been willing to die for a smile. P.365-66
The ideal that inspires the formulation of the principles of efficiency is elimination of waste, of wastes of all kinds resulting finally in wastes of the collective soul. P.371
The ideal that inspires the formulation of the principles of efficiency is elimination of waste, of wastes of all kinds resulting finally in wastes of the collective soul. P.371
The ideals of United States Steel Corporation: The ideals of the corporation seem to have been
(1) Law abidence
(2) Rational publicity
(3) Steady prices at a high level
(4) maximum tonnage
(5) Permanence for its own business by the purchase of large ore and coal reserves
(6) Rapid improvement of the properties so as to make them worth the capitalized value
(7) Maintenance of a high level of wages
(8) Identification of the worker with the profits of his work, thus increasing his interesting in his occupation. P.383
Does the Steel Corporation know as to every detail what ought to be as well as it knows what has been? P.391
A chapter about Harrington Emerson
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=a6F-AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q&f=false
Updated 29 June 2021, 13 June 2020, 11 July 2019, 9 July 2017, 3 October 2013
There is nothing men will not attempt when great enterprises hold out the promise of great rewards. - Livy
Out of eighteen items of operating costs, as distinguished from selling costs, only one is directly influenced by the worker, that is time-quality of the work. P.355
Efficiency reward is not a money payment, this is only one of its myriad forms. Men have been willing to die for a smile. P.365-66
The ideal that inspires the formulation of the principles of efficiency is elimination of waste, of wastes of all kinds resulting finally in wastes of the collective soul. P.371
The ideal that inspires the formulation of the principles of efficiency is elimination of waste, of wastes of all kinds resulting finally in wastes of the collective soul. P.371
The ideals of United States Steel Corporation: The ideals of the corporation seem to have been
(1) Law abidence
(2) Rational publicity
(3) Steady prices at a high level
(4) maximum tonnage
(5) Permanence for its own business by the purchase of large ore and coal reserves
(6) Rapid improvement of the properties so as to make them worth the capitalized value
(7) Maintenance of a high level of wages
(8) Identification of the worker with the profits of his work, thus increasing his interesting in his occupation. P.383
Does the Steel Corporation know as to every detail what ought to be as well as it knows what has been? P.391
A chapter about Harrington Emerson
https://books.google.co.in/books?id=a6F-AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q&f=false
Updated 29 June 2021, 13 June 2020, 11 July 2019, 9 July 2017, 3 October 2013
Emerson's principles are to be used in developing productivity management topic.
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