Review Article
___________________________________________________________________________
About Review on Articles in Maynard's Handbook
I am trying to summarize the article in the Maynard's handbook and simultaneously express my views regarding the topic. I advocate certain changes in the focus and practice of industrial engineering and I wish to bring out these ideas of mine in these reviews. These reviews will be continuously revised by me in response to comments made by visitors.
----------------------------------
Review on
CHAPTER 1.1
(Maynard's Industrial Engineering Handbook, 5th Edition, Edited by Zandin, Collaboration by Japanese Management Association)
(Maynard's Industrial Engineering Handbook, 5th Edition, Edited by Zandin, Collaboration by Japanese Management Association)
THE PURPOSE AND EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
Louis A. Martin-Vega
National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia
BIOGRAPHY
Louis A. Martin-Vega, Ph.D., P.E., is currently the director of the Division of Design, Manufacture, and Industrial Innovation at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.
He is on leave from Lehigh University. He is a professor and former chairman of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Prior to joining Lehigh, he held the Lockheed Professorship at Florida Institute of Technology. Martin-Vega’s research and consulting interests are in the areas of production and manufacturing systems.
------------------------------
Introduction
The purpose of industrial engineering is human effort engineering and systems efficiency engineering (Narayana Rao).
Taylor stated his purpose as achieving more output from the same machine - man combination giving benefit of increased production to consumers, operators & managers and organization.
Historical events in industrial engineering are covered in detail in Emerson and Naehring, Saunders, Shultz , Nadler , Pritsker, and Turner et al. Since the history of industrial engineering is strongly linked to the history of manufacturing, Hopp and Spearman (Factory Physics) is a particularly interesting reference that has relevant exposition of the history of American manufacturing.
Early Origins of Engineering
There are centuries-old examples of early engineering practice and accomplishments, such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and the Roman construction projects. But, it was in the eighteenth century that the first engineering schools appeared in France. The need for greater efficiency in the design and analysis of bridges, roads, and buildings resulted in principles of early engineering and these topics were taught first in military academies (military engineering). The application of these principles to nonmilitary or civilian endeavors led to the term civil engineering. Interrelated advancements in the fields of physics and mathematics laid the groundwork for the development and application of mechanical principles. The need for improvements in the design and analysis of materials and devices such as pumps and engines resulted in the emergence of mechanical engineering as a distinct field in the early nineteenth century. Similar circumstances can be ascribed to the emergence and development of electrical engineering and chemical engineering.
Industrial engineering also developed from practices of industrial production, empirical evidence collected from it and understanding based on the evidence. Then research increased to develop a more scientific base.
Industrial Production and Early Empirical Observations
The industrial production practice dates back to the Industrial Revolution, which began in England during the mid-eighteenth century. The concept of a production system, which lies at the core of modern industrial engineering practice and research, had its genesis in the factories created as a result of innovations in industrial revolution.
Adam Smith in his treatise The Wealth of Nations developed concepts such as the division of labor and the “invisible hand” of capitalism. These served to motivate many of the technological innovators of the Industrial Revolution to establish and implement factory systems. Early factory related developments include Arkwright’s implementation of management control systems to regulate production and the output of factory workers, and the well-organized factory that Watt, together with an associate, Matthew Boulton, built to produce steam engines.
Charles Babbage visited number of factories in England and the United States in the early 1800s and his observations were documented in his book entitled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. The book includes subjects such as the time required for learning a particular task, the effects of subdividing tasks into smaller and less detailed elements, the time and cost savings associated with changing from one task to another, and the advantages to be gained by repetitive tasks. In his classic example on the manufacture of straight pins, Babbage extends the work of Adam Smith on the division of labor by showing that money could be saved by assigning lesser-paid workers (in those days women and children) to lesser-skilled operations and restricting the higher-skilled, higher paid workers to only those operations requiring higher skill levels. Babbage also discusses notions related to wage payments, issues related to present-day profit sharing plans, and even ideas associated with the organization of labor and labor relations
Babbage’s ideas got further support by the efforts of Eli Whitney and Simeon North’s innovation of interchangeable parts. Under Whitney’s system, the individual parts were mass-produced to tolerances tight enough to enable their use in any finished product. The division of labor called for by Adam Smith could now be carried out to an extent never before achievable, with individual workers producing single parts rather than complete products. The result was a significant reduction in the need for specialized skills on the part of the workers—a result that eventually led to the bigger industrial establishments, which became the object of study of Frederick W. Taylor, the person who was given the honor being named founder of industrial engineering or father of industrial engineering.
Pioneers of Industrial Engineering
Frederick Taylor, Frank Gilbreth and Harrington Emerson have to be given the principal credit for giving birth to industrial engineering discipline. Taylor focused on redesign of engineering systems based on cost data and productivity data and laid the foundation for the discipline of industrial engineering.
Taylor and Gilbreth worked in the area of human effort engineering that promotes efficiency of human resources and gives them extra income in production systems. Emerson specifically worked on the efficiency dimension of systems.
Taylor and Scientific Management
One cannot presume to be well versed in the origins of industrial engineering without reading Taylor’s books: Shop Management and The Principles of Scientific Management.
An engineer to the core, Taylor earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and developed several inventions for which he received patents. His engineering accomplishments would have been sufficient to guarantee him a place in history. His contributions to management that resulted in a set of principles and concepts which were considered by Drucker to be “possibly the most powerful as well as lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”
The core of Taylor’s system consisted of breaking down the production process into its component parts and improving the efficiency of each. He focused on machine work. Machine work was accelerated through understanding the variables that control cutting speed and quality. He also increased productivity through the use of new cutting tool materials, improved design of cutting tools, jigs, fixtures, and other devices—many invented by Taylor himself. He honed manual tasks to maximum efficiency by examining each component separately and eliminating all false, slow, and useless movements. In essence, Taylor was trying to do for work units what Whitney had done for material units: standardize them and make them interchangeable.
Taylor developed science of metal cutting to improve machine work efficiency. Improvement of human work efficiency under the Taylor system was based on the analysis and improvement of work methods, reduction of the time required to carry out the work, and the development of work standards. With an abiding faith in the scientific method, Taylor developed “time study” to provide predictability and precision for manual tasks that he had achieved with his formulas for metal cutting.
Taylor’s interest in what today we classify as the area of work measurement was also motivated by the information that studies of this nature could supply for planning activities. In this sense, his work laid the foundation for a broader “science of planning”: a science totally empirical in nature but one that he was able to demonstrate could significantly improve productivity.
To Taylor, scientific management was a philosophy based not only on the scientific study of work and its improvement but also on the scientific selection, education, and development of workers. His classic experiments in machining as well as in shoveling coal, resulted in development of standards and methods for carrying out these tasks and also led to the creation of tool and storage rooms as service departments, the development of inventory and ordering systems, the creation of personnel departments for worker selection, the creation of training departments to instruct workers in the standard methods, recognition of the importance of the layout of manufacturing facilities to ensure minimum movement of people and materials, the creation of departments for organizing and planning production, and the development of incentive payment systems to reward those workers able to exceed standard outputs. Thus many productivity management initiatives were started by F.W. Taylor. Any doubt about Taylor’s impact on the birth and development of industrial engineering should be erased by simply correlating the previously described functions with many of the fields of work and topics that continue to play a major role in the practice of the profession and its educational content at the university level today.
Taylor contributed technological progress, a concept used in Economic Theory of Growth to refer to increase in output from the same amount of resources. Taylor's machine effort engineering and human effort engineering resulted in the increased output from same machine and manpower resources.
Taylor actually started the industrial engineering department in his company under the name "rate fixing department." But latter day texts did not give any reference to it.
Frank Gilbreth
Frank Gilbreth’s application of the scientific method to the laying of bricks produced results that were as revolutionary as those of Taylor’s experiments. He extended the concepts of scientific management to the identification, analysis, and measurement of fundamental motions involved in performing work. By applying the motion-picture camera to the task of analyzing motions he was able to categorize the elements of human motions into 18 basic elements or therbligs. This development marked a distinct step forward in the analysis of human work, for the first time permitting analysts to design jobs with knowledge of the time required to perform the job. In many respects these developments also marked the beginning of the field of human factors or ergonomics.
Lillian Gilbreth, wife of Frank Gilbreth, provided significant insight and contributions to the human issues associated with their studies. Lillian’s book, The Psychology of Management (based on her doctoral thesis in psychology at Brown University), advanced the premise that because of its emphasis on scientific selection and training, scientific management offered ample opportunity for individual development, while traditional management stifled such development by concentrating power in a central figure. Known as the “first lady of engineering,” she was the first woman to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is generally credited with bringing to the industrial engineering profession a concern for human welfare and human relations that was not present in the work of many pioneers of the scientific management movement.
System and Process Industrial Engineering - Process Chart Method - Gilbreths - 1921
Emerson became a champion of efficiency and emphasized certain aspects more prominently. He summarized his approach in his book, the Twelve Principles of Efficiency and contributed specially to productivity management ideas.
Emerson, who had reorganized the workshops of the Santa Fe Railroad, testified during the hearings of the Interstate Commerce Commission concerning a proposed railroad rate hike in 1910 to 1911 that scientific management could save “a million dollars a day.” Because he was the only “efficiency engineer” with firsthand experience in the railroad industry, his statement carried enormous weight and served to emblazon scientific management on the national consciousness.
Later in his career he became particularly interested in selection and training of employees and is also credited with originating the term dispatching in reference to shop floor control, a phrase that undoubtedly derives from his railroad experience.
Efficiency Society organized by Emerson later merged with Taylor Society to form Society for Advancement of Management.
Harrington Emerson - The efficiency focus
Emerson became a champion of efficiency and emphasized certain aspects more prominently. He summarized his approach in his book, the Twelve Principles of Efficiency and contributed specially to productivity management ideas.
Emerson, who had reorganized the workshops of the Santa Fe Railroad, testified during the hearings of the Interstate Commerce Commission concerning a proposed railroad rate hike in 1910 to 1911 that scientific management could save “a million dollars a day.” Because he was the only “efficiency engineer” with firsthand experience in the railroad industry, his statement carried enormous weight and served to emblazon scientific management on the national consciousness.
Later in his career he became particularly interested in selection and training of employees and is also credited with originating the term dispatching in reference to shop floor control, a phrase that undoubtedly derives from his railroad experience.
Efficiency Society organized by Emerson later merged with Taylor Society to form Society for Advancement of Management.
Methods Engineering and Work Simplification
In the 1920's and 30s, there was increased interest in the work of the Gilbreths and their process charts. That focus led to development of methods productivity analysis based on questioning the current process documented as operation, inspection, transport, delays and storage. In 1927, H. B. Maynard, G. J. Stegmerten, and S. M. Lowry wrote Time and Motion Study, emphasizing the importance of motion study and good methods. This eventually led to the term methods engineering as the descriptor of a technique emphasizing the “elimination of every unnecessary operation” to improve the process and the determination of a time standard for the improved process. In 1932, A. H. Mogenson published Common Sense Applied to Time and Motion Study, in which he stressed the application of process chart method through an approach he chose to call work simplification. His thesis was simply that the workers doing a job have good amount of knowledge about the job. Therefore, if the workers are trained in the steps necessary to analyze and challenge the work they are doing, then they can also implement improvements. His approach was to train key people in manufacturing plants at his Lake Placid Work Simplification Conferences so that they could in turn conduct similar training in their own plants for managers and workers. This concept of taking motion study training directly to the workers through the work simplification programs helped the war production effort during World War II. It was promoted in Japan by the US team after second world war and today it became popular as Kaizen.
The first Ph.D. granted in the United States in the field of industrial engineering was for research done in the area of motion study by Ralph M. Barnes in Cornell University in 1933. The thesis was supervised by Dexter Kimball. Barnes published his thesis as a text book, Motion and Time Study.
Another direction of research is further look at the behavioral aspects associated with the workplace and the human element. The approach taken by Taylor, Lilian Gilbreth and their followers was further developed by industrial psychologists. The earliest writers in the field of industrial psychology acknowledged their debt to scientific management and framed their discussions in terms consistent with this system.
Other Contributions
Other contributors to scientific management and industrial engineering include, L. P. Alford, Arthur C. Anderson, W. Edwards Deming, Eugene L. Grant, Robert Hoxie, Joseph Juran, Marvin E. Mundel, George H. Shepard, and Walter Shewart.
In particular, Shewart’s book, Economic Control of the Quality of Manufactured Product, published in 1931, contains the theory of sampling as an effective approach for controlling quality in the production process. His work marked the beginning of modern statistical quality control, promoted in industrial engineering curriculums and the use of many of the tools that today are taught to everyone, including workers, as a means of empowering (giving skills) them to control the quality of their work.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Related Knols
Computer Aided Industrial Engineering (CAIE) - Presentation and Paper of Prof. Narayana Rao K.V.S.S. NITIE@IISE Annual Conference 2021 - Highlights
Knol No. 538
Updated 4.10.2021, 10 Sep 2021
Pub 26.12.2012
I read above information. It's true. Institute have give to theoretical knowledge with practical knowledge.
ReplyDeleteInstitute Management Solution
One cannot presume to be well versed in the origins of industrial engineering without reading Taylor’s books: Shop Management and The Principles of Scientific Management. Prof. Louis A. Martin-Vega
ReplyDeleteTHE PURPOSE AND EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING - - Review of Prof. Louis Martin-Vega's Essay. Updated.
#IndustrialEngineering #Productivity #CostReduction #ShopManagement #ScientificManagement
http://nraoiekc.blogspot.com/2012/03/purpose-and-evolution-of-industrial.html