Ubiquity of Industrial Engineering Principle of Industrial Engineering.
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Chapter XII THE TENTH PRINCIPLE: STANDARDIZED OPERATIONS
Standardized Operation - planned - trained - practiced - used - monitored - improved.
HE talked to me for ten minutes, outlined enough work for ten years, and expected it to be completed in ten days." This is the concise summing up of an interview between an efficient worker and his employer. It is so easy to perceive short-comings, so easy to plan work, so hard to realize that endless activity through endless time is the price of perfection. The hopefulness of humanity is not a recent development.
Moses came down into camp with his tables of stone and the ten commandments. It took one minute and fifty seconds to read them slowly and impressively. Moses expected that the tribes assembled would listen, practice, and become perfect before they reached the Promised Land. Thirty-five hundred years have elapsed and the breach of most of the commandments is still very popular. It is because the virtues extolled are not obvious, or instinctive, that they have to be graven on stone, that they have to be repeated weekly if not daily, that they have to be incorporated in our codes and enforced by our courts. Nature has ultimate ideals, but nature's creatures are not habitually idealists, reverent, kindly, clean, chaste, or honest. Ideals are so obscure that most of us do not know what ideals we hold. The warrior still holds an exalted and honorable position, not on account of his heroic courage, but on account of the potential carnage. The corners engineered in Wall Street, the ebb outward of enhanced securities, the flow inward of the same securities artificially depreciated, constitute a tolerated and even admired phase of modern business ; and so it goes. Two minutes for orders — a life time, an aeon, for realization ! Can we wonder, therefore, that industrial operations are unstandardized — that the Moses who should lead the mob out of the wilderness flounders around for forty years, never arrives at all, and (if biblical accounts are correct) left as villainous a band of marauders, of Apaches, as ever existed to fall on the cities of Canaan? If this were all that the very great and extraordinary actual leader Moses could accomplish, need we wonder that the ordinary shop managers are not more successful?
We begin indeed with ideals; we expect end results; we leap over the intervening stations of the preceding nine principles, much as if we expected a train to run from New York to San Francisco with one helping of coal, water, lubrication, with one train crew. The rope is made of many minor strands ; these are twisted from the numerous threads, and these in turn have been spun from broken and carded fibres. The sheep's fleece is a unit, a matted mass that adheres and forms a whole, not because it is woven like a blanket, but because of its inter-woven confusion and tangle. There is no popular English word for a single thread of wool. Pull one lock and the whole fleece comes, not because of orderly connection, but because of disorderly tangle.
The march of a regiment is one thing, the surge of the crowd that jostles and sways us and upsets all orderly progress is another thing. The sheep is a silly creature, the only animal that would perish without the care of man, so no wonder its fleece is such a mess. The matted, tangled hair of some savages, hair plastered with mud, is comparable to the fleece, but civilized man settles the problem by clipping his head hair so that it could not tangle if it tried, settles his face hair by shaving off every vestige of it three to six times a week; but woman, more patient, with more capacity for taking pains, brushes and combs out her long locks, beginning at the ends, straightening a few inches at a time, then reaching higher up, rearranging all the parts already perfected, and so back to the head, until each of the 40,000 separate hairs lies in its own appointed place as to all the others, and all contribute to the marvelous and intricate creations that as a whole crown her lovely head. If it were not for the ideal plan the task would be hopeless. At least once a day does woman adjust her hair, the 40,000 single hairs to the general plan, and once a day should the 40,000 operations of the shop be straightened out in accordance with a general plan.
A comprehensive shop plan, graphically expressed, looks like a flattened tree. Each leaf, the separate operations, must be in order in its appointed place; each twig, with its own definite length, must reach in sequence into the main branches, these in turn being distributed at determined intervals along the main stem and trunk.
The trunk grows upwards and outwards, from the force implanted in the seed, the original ideal of the tree, but there is a reverse flow of imprisoned sunlight and captured carbon from the leaves back into the roots. The separate operations in a shop must flow into the final output ; but from the expected output
backward, there must be a plan that reaches back to each detail of every operation.
It is one thing to build a battleship taking up details as they occur — the haphazard method; it is another thing to make the plan first, place all the details where they belong in time, space, relation and perfection, and have them drop into place with the accuracy of a watch movement — the difference, in fact, between the running of sand through an unstandardized aperture, and the precision of the chronometer. Good results are not achieved by chance.
If we throw four dice with the hope of turning up four aces, we find that the chances are enormously against us. I learned this practically by costly experience and then figured it out mathematically. At a German country fair the fakirs had a disk divided into twenty-two sections, alternately white and red. The sections carried numbers from 4 to 24. There were two red sections with the number 14. The cost per throw of four dice was ten cents, but every white section was a prize winner ; all the reds were losers. This looked fair, an even chance, except for the extra red 14, and as I gazed I perceived that the prizes were large, running from twenty-five cents to ten dollars. All I could possibly risk was ten cents; every other section was a prize winner and I might win ten dollars. I threw the dice again and again, but somehow or other the numbers I threw came between 9 and 19, and these were all red numbers, not anything as low as 8 or as high as 20, the lowest of the prizes. I lost the whole of the dollar that had been saved up for the day's enjoyment, for the miniature rail-road, for the circus, for the other thrillers, and then I invoked mathematics. All the possible different throws of four dice are 1,296. There is one chance in 1,296 of throwing four aces, of throwing four sixes ; there are four chances of throwing 5 or 23. There are one hundred and forty-six chances of throwing 14. The chances for the white numbers were 146, for the red numbers, 1,156. The chances against me were more than eight to one. The professional gambler wisely loads his dice so they will throw aces and sixes or at least come high. In the industrial operation the chance of the desired combination coming out of itself is just about the chance of throwing four aces.
We must imitate the professional gambler, and either select those combinations that will give us the inevitable advantage — that is, plan a board to suit — or we must load the dice so as to offset the chances against us.
There is only one game of chess. There is the board, standardized as to size, 15 to 16 inches square, just 64 squares, 32 pieces, each with its definite rights of movement. It looks like a very limited and standardized condition, yet possibilities of operation are so infinite that if all the inhabitants of the world played chess continually from now until the end of time, they could not exhaust all the variations, thus experimentally determining which was the best possible game, that one in which each player makes the best possible attacking and resistant moves, yet the total number of squares traveled is a minimum. It might be a long drawn-out game and it might be a short one — who knows, how shall we ever know? If, therefore, there is such infinite variety and possibility in chess, which has been played for centuries, how can we expect shop operations to standardize themselves ?
I have before me one volume of the standard-practice instructions covering the manufacturing of the gasoline automobile truck car. It contains 278 isometric designs or illustrations, 314 pages of printed matter, and spaces for the times and rates of 1,231 distinct operations. Each one of these operations was preceded by many designs until one was accepted as approximately good. The design was split up into its component parts, investigation made as to material of each piece, how strong it should be, what heat treatment should be given, on what machines it should be shaped, in what sequence, by which worker. As to each piece and operation many time studies are made, and finally from the mass of accurately ascertained or available information, a carefully pre-studied work-instruction card is made out. All these
items of planning must precede the time and cost ratings. Are you appalled at the mass of detail that precedes the making of a book? If we have but 100 copies to print it is cheaper, quicker, and better than manuscript duplication; if we have 3 copies to make it is better to choose the typewriter and provide carbon manifolds than to write it out by hand. If we want only 300 screws and it takes 3 hours to set up the automatic machine and only 3 minutes to run out the screws, it is better to use the automatic. A modern activity, whether the operation of an industrial shop, or a railroad, or of the turrets and guns of a battleship, is part of a gigantic, automatic machine; and it pays to plan in advance, not to trust to the hap-
hazard.Given the head of hair combed from child-hood, never matted with clay; the head of hair to which daily the habit of neatness, great skill, and unrelenting care is applied — and the problem is solved. Given any activity in which planning has been incorporated as a habit, and apparent difficulties fade away before patience and persistence.
Nevertheless, the difficulties are very real and there is a middle ground between the optimism that underrates them and the despair that refuses to master them. There are between 8,000 to 16,000 separate pieces in a locomotive, and each railroad in the country wants a different design. One great railroad used 256 different styles of locomotives, so that there is an appalling lack of standards; but the more reason for beginning at once.
Modern watches are marvels of intricate and perfect construction. Any child can push a stick in the ground and by the position and length of the shadow determine approximately the time. A clepsydra or water clock, an hour glass, physical material leaking away at a uniform rate, was a decided advance at guessing on the time in the dark, or the time for boiling an egg. The early clocks with their pendulum escapements required many months of experimental test before length of pendulum, meshing of wheels, amount of weight, were adjusted to one another. There are as many different kinds of watches and clocks as there are locomotives; but each is perfect with a perfection so great as to be almost inconceivable. The jewelled bearings, the almost microscopic yet mathematically perfectly shaped teeth of the wheels, the hair spring, the balance wheel, each is perfect in itself, perfectly related to the others, until the whole is also perfect. This is not all. Delicate, automatic machines are made which turn out these perfected parts so exactly alike as to be interchangeable. Turret lathes and screw machines, automatic machines in general, were earliest adapted to clock and watch making, and from that extended to larger and heavier parts, often beyond the point of economy; for in watch screws the material, even if of gold, would not amount to very much, the perfection of finish being all-important, but as the weight of material grows with the cube of its linear measurement, we cannot afford to make on automatic machines crank-pins or even knuckle-pins for locomotives, it being too expensive to cut down the
solid bar.
It would take no more thought and work to standardize operations for building a locomotive than for building a watch. The difference is that watches are turned out by the hundred thousands and locomotives only by the thousand; but this difference is not as great as it seems, for a watch movement may average $5in value and a locomotive $15,000, so that one locomotive corresponds to 3,000 watches, and as we have not hesitated to undertake the work of designing each separate locomotive part, we need not fear the labor of standardizing the operation of manufacture for each separate locomotive part.
Standardization of Printed Parameters
Another instance of standardized operation is the printing of a book. The old writers were individualists; there was no standardized operation. Each made not only the size of the letters to suit himself, but also their forms, took pride in not being like other scribes ; each spelled the words his own way, each used his stylus or brush as he preferred, preparing his own ink, his own papyrus or parchment. Now we buy half a dozen newspapers a day for a cent each, we buy a dozen magazines a week for ten cents each, we buy a hundred books a year for a dollar or two each. Scarcely any two books are alike; there is far greater variation than in locomotives or watches; but each book is made up and printed with standardized spelling, standardized lines, standardized pages and standardized signatures; even the book itself approaches a standard in size. The ink is made to suit various fluctuations in the weather, the paper is made to suit the quality of the book in press. While printing is as yet standardized in a rudimentary way only, while it affords a field as large as any manufacturing business in the country, it has nevertheless in certain limited directions standardized operation to an advanced extent,
In the watch, in the book, we have the standardized operation as to the manner in which it shall be carried out; but there is another element — that of individual skill.
Two men may both show a model wall of brick, yet one man may have laid 3,000 bricks a day, the other man only 300.
"So true it is that one man and one intellect properly qualified for the particular undertaking is a host in itself and of extraordinary efficiency." Thus wrote Polybius, 212 B. C, in describing the work of that great engineer Archimedes, who, by his individual genius, flung rocks from catapults at the approaching besieging ships, who constructed cranes that let down grab hooks, lifted the ships out of the water, and turning them over, let them fall to destruction.
Horses have trotted and trotted well for many centuries, but it remained for Americans to figure out that the value of a minute might be rated at $3,000,000, and that to eliminate the minute, to evolve the mile-in-two-minute horse from the mile-in-three-minute horse would be worth this amount. Prizes were offered to crack trotters for beating their own record, $10,000 for the fifth of a second, and there are 300 fifths in a single minute. It was not only the horse that was developed; it was also the American stop-watch spirit, so that our fire fighters, whose every movement for men and teams has been standardized, are able to charge across the threshold of their firehouse 20 seconds after the gong has sounded. Less than the fifth of a second is said to cover the advantage of a runner to first base in modern base-ball.
At an international contest in Berlin several years ago it took the English team over two minutes and the German team over eight minutes to make a start
Now aeroplanes have come; and at the inter-national meet in Belmont, true to our national virtues and our national faults, we were prepared to time the flights to the hundredth part of a second, but with a year's warning we had no machines wherewith to fly and we lost to the foreigners because we were unprepared.
Standardization of Operation of Ship Guns Firing
Probably the most marvelous and valuable example of standardized operations anywhere in the world is on our American fleets in battle practice. The art of war has not changed as to its fundamentals since men first began to fight on land or sea. The purpose is with a stronger force to overwhelm a weaker opposing fleet, to strike first, hardest and quickest. It was Goliath's idea to pick off the Israelites one by one, and a modern pugilist could defeat a hundred men if they charged him singly, and he could down the first before the second came up. A Dreadnaught makes all the navies of the world without Dreadnaughts obsolete, because such a battleship with its ten 12-inch guns, can fire a broadside from all of them at once while steaming at 21 knots.
Such a battleship, steaming as fast as any rivals, bringing more guns into action than any rival, hitting an enemy at seven miles, could destroy the whole of an opposing fleet one by one, even as the pugilist would take the lighter weights one by one. But the horse-trotting, fire-fighting American stop-watch practice is also in the Navy, and it was realized that if these big guns could be fired four times as fast, it would be very nearly the same as having four times as many guns or four times as many Dreadnaughts, and also that if the skill of aim could be increased four-fold, if four shots would reach the target as compared to one in the older practice, one modern Arkansas or Wyoming, with twelve 12-inch guns, firing four times as fast and hitting four times as often, will, for the time being at least, be sixteen
times as effective. These big guns are loaded, aimed, and fired twice in a minute. The practice drill is only half this time, and this practice drill is of two kinds. There is the physical act of loading the heavy gun, there is the more important act of pointing it. Two opposing ships are 10,000 yards apart (about 6 miles) steaming at 18 knots in diverging directions. The rate of change of range may be 750 yards a minute. If the range is set for every 50 yards, it must be redetermined every 4 seconds. This is impossible, but it can be determined every 30 seconds and a salvo be fired every 30 seconds. Being able to determine the range twice a minute, to fire twice a minute, the remaining part is drill in pointing or aiming, and this is done by means of much practice with models. To hit a target 60 feet wide and 30 feet high at 30,000 feet with a big gun, when you can cover it twice over by the point of a lead pencil at arm's length, is considerably harder than to hit a target 1 inch high at 83 feet with a small gun ; but it is much better and much cheaper to fire 1,000 shots with the small gun than to fire the big gun once, and when the big gun is fired four times in practice, after training with small apparatus, it will do better than if firing 100 real shots without the model practice.
In the battle practice I saw the first 12-inch range-finding shot, from a distance of 14,000 yards, go clean through a 30 by 60 target ; and so accurate and secure was the aim of all the salvos that we calmly watched the shots splash all around the floating target only 400 yards away. The firing end was not less impressive. The team work was so perfect that the salvos from the same ship were redirected one after
the other almost with the ease with which a child swings a garden hose.
I have also watched diminutive and juvenile Igorot savages shoot dimes from a forked stick at 60 feet with bow and arrow. The Igorots show us the beginnings of offensive skill; modern American battleship target practice shows us the highest speed, accuracy, and distance yet attained, and we may not doubt that our present achievement is but a step in man's ultimate achievement.
The improvement in the effectiveness of the different ships of the Navy in the last five years is very great, and is probably the greatest improvement both in importance and magnitude that has ever been accomplished. Think of the small degree to which the steam turbine is superior to the reciprocating engine (a questionable 5 per cent), or how very little faster the best passenger trains are than the slowest of the same class (about 25 per cent). Think of the enormous expense in time and money spent in developing either steam turbines or high-speed trains — then think of the sixteen-fold increased efficiency of our battleships as compared to five years ago, an increased efficiency due to the application of the principles of efficiency — all of them — Ideals, Common Sense, Competent Counsel, Discipline, the Fair Deal, Reliable and Immediate Records, Schedules (of 10,000 yards), Despatching (of big shot at the rate of ten or twelve a minute), Standardized Conditions, Standardized Operation (secured by constant and assiduous team drill), most minute Standard-Practice Instructions (as to how fifths of seconds can be saved in time); finally, a joyful and much coveted Efficiency Reward, in both honor and emolument, when the tremendous results have been accomplished. And when this appears not only in the spectacular gunnery, but also in the more prosaic but continuously important operations of firing coal; of coaling ship (the record as to this having increased from 30 tons an hour to 360 tons an hour on some of the ships for the whole cruise around the world); of the maintenance of operation of machinery on board ship without going to Navy yards — these accomplishments show that high efficiency requires neither great outlay nor protracted time, but only the proper intelligence, spirit, and organization. The seagoing form of organization is admirably adapted to apply the principles, since a gun drill, a coal drill, a re-coaling drill, is but a practical and modern form of drill. The ideal is not a mere dress parade, but to hit accurately, fast, and furiously, at the greatest distance, an enemy's ship overtaken by better management throughout; and this ideal has been accomplished, stop watch in hand refining all the conditions and operations, this refinement made possible by bringing to bear all the available knowledge in the universe. This Navy work is a great game, not drudgery ; it is pleasurable excitement and joyously hard work.
Thus gradually, from all sides — from the watch and sewing-machine and typewriter factory, from the race-track, from the fire-fighters, from the manipulation of the big 12-inch guns, from schedules, despatching, standardized conditions and standardized operation in some shops — the methods of efficiency are spreading.
Planning pays; the application of all the principles of efficiency pays; but standardized operation is the principle that most appeals to the individuality of the man, of the worker. Ideals are passive, common-sense is passive, planning in all its phases is passive, but standardized operation becomes an individual joy with its wealth of active manifestation.
Let none hesitate because we cannot standardize each new operation. We cannot standardize every errand boy's every trip ; we cannot standardize every naval battle; but we can so inspire both errand boy and admiral that each will always do his best, we can give them training, knowledge, help, and incentive; and if we do this for them and for all other workers, even though we cannot drill and redrill as to the performance of the occasional operation, we can be absolutely sure that no savable time will be wasted nor effort lost in performing it.
Commentary by KVSSNRao
Planning pays; the application of all the principles of efficiency pays; but standardized operation is the principle that most appeals to the individuality of the man, of the worker. Ideals are passive, common-sense is passive, planning in all its phases is passive, but standardized operation becomes an individual joy with its wealth of active manifestation.
Ud 11.12.2021, 11.11.2021
Pub 3.10.2013
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