Industrial Engineering Knowledge Center: Chapter 9 The Seventh Principle: DESPATCHING

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Chapter 9 The Seventh Principle: DESPATCHING - Harrington Emerson

Lesson 346 of Productivity Management Module of Industrial Engineering Online Course Notes

Important points of the Chapter

Dispatch and Despatch - Difference

There is no difference between dispatch and despatch. The latter is an alternative spelling that was common in the 19th century and earlier, but dispatch has gained undisputed dominance in modern English. Despatch has mostly disappeared from the language—except in the U.K., where it appears in place of dispatch about a third of the time—and dispatch is the preferred spelling for all senses of the word.

https://grammarist.com/spelling/dispatch-despatch/

According to Oxford dictionary, both spellings are correct and are synonymous for all meanings of the word. While despatch is a variant of the word that was more popular in the early nineteenth century, in modern writings, dispatch is preferred over despatch. Despatch has more or less disappeared from modern language, though British still insist on using the word despatch as they feel it is correct spelling.

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-despatch-and-vs-dispatch/

Dispatch verb [T] (SEND)

to send something, especially goods or a message, somewhere for a particular purpose:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dispatch

Railroad Despatching

Railroad despatching is the most extended and striking example of advance planning and daily realization. In the running of trains a very great deal precedes despatching. There is a carefully worked out schedule which has been more or less tried out for months.

In railroad operation, lines of track nearly a thousand miles long stretch between cities like New York and Chicago. Every switch, every grade, every curve, is known by the rail road managers; the line is studded with signal towers and punctuated with stations. The potential speed of each rail in various track segments is known. On the basis of these conditions a schedule is made out, a schedule of running time, with due allowance for grades and curves and stations, an 18-hour schedule from New York to Chicago. The train is then despatched.

The despatchers issue orders to the conductor and to the block-signal men, thus controlling the train from both ends. While under the train is under the orders of the conductor, the signals under the control of the signal engineer, it is the despatcher who from start to finish holds the movement of the train in the hollow of his hand. This is the highest degree of despatching that has been reached in America. It is perfect in its way, and all Americans are justly proud of it,

Emerson says, in manufacturing and repair shops, advance planning and scheduling are not adequate. Hence there is poor despatching or specific instruction to operators to start a specific job so that the shop can deliver to the customer as per plan and also do the work efficiently that is at the lowest cost feasible.

Chapter IX THE SEVENTH PRINCIPLE: DESPATCHING

Book (Harrington Emerson - The Twelve Principles of Efficiency)

THE Eskimo counts days by sleeps, counts months by moons, and counts years by long snows. He despatches himself by the seasons. The Egyptians knew that days varied in length, that the moon was no despatcher of seasons, and that the sun was no despatcher of the year, so they fell back on So this, the dog-star, and based their chronology on the great So this period of 1,461 years. Our watches and chronometers are run on sidereal time.

With our photography, with our spectroscopes, we find that in one direction the stars are widening out, that in the opposite direction they are drawing together, as our solar system swings through space; and ultimately we shall fall back on the whole universe as chief despatcher.

If we could photograph the stars at intervals of a hundred years until we had five-thousand pictures, and then run the views on a moving-picture machine, all would be rapid interlacing motion where now there seems to be immutable rest.

So much for the infinitely large; but despatching is just as much in evidence in the infinitely little.

In three weeks' time, a hen's egg, if kept warm, will change from an albuminous and fatty mass into the living chick. As boys in an English school we secured cards of silkworm eggs, hatched them by the heat of our own bodies, carefully reared the worms, watching the alternate periods of voracious activity and sloughing numbness. We watched them spin their cocoons, within which they changed to chrysalids, to emerge later as delicately beauti-ful moths — unless we cut short their despatching and despatched them our way with boiling water. All growth and decay are manifestations of the principle of despatching. The emanations of radium, that marvelous element, have almost revealed to us the ultimate constitution of matter, and we now know that every atom is in a ferment of activity, as orderly as and perhaps far more complicated than a solar system.

The Egyptians had wrested from the stars their time secrets and arranged accordingly their dynasties, also their great So this month once in 120 years, a leap-year month ; but they did not know that ophthalmia is carried by filthy flies and that it grows in each case as regularly as solar cycles. So from the prehistoric paleolithic age to the last decade, Egyptian babies have gone blind with preventable blindness.

It is apparently easier to grasp and acquiesce in the large than in the small, easier to rush to certain death in a battle than to endure a cinder in the eye, but he that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.

At every hotel there are racks filled with railroad time-tables. These are issued by the ton every month and show to the minute the exact time during the future weeks every passenger train in the United States is scheduled to reach every station. These are the popular, abridged time-tables. For the employees there are time-tables much more carefully compiled, covering also the freight trains and giving all the rules of operation.

In railroad operation marvelous despatching has been attained, more accurate than the seasons, more reliable than the tides, almost equal to the star time on which it is based. Lines of track nearly a thousand miles long stretch between New York and Chicago. Every switch, every grade, every curve, is known ; the line is studded with signal towers and punctuated with stations. In the round house is a locomotive with boiler capable of carrying 225-pounds steam pressure, which through the cylinders and pistons pushes on the wheels with rims polished like glass. The rims transmit 400 horse power through a quarter-inch square of contact with a glass-smooth rail. With one load of coal, drinking from tanks as it runs, the locomotive is able to speed 140 miles at the rate of 60 miles an hour. The seventy-two to eighty-four wheel axles under the train must each run true in its box, everything in track and equipment, in men, and above all in spirit, must be in perfect order all the time. On the basis of these conditions a schedule is made out, a schedule of running time, with due allowance for grades and curves and stations, an 18-hour schedule from New York to Chicago. The train is then despatched.

The despatchers issue orders to the conductor and to the block-signal men, thus controlling the train from both ends. While under the orders of the conductor, while physically under the control of the engineer, it is the despatcher who from start to finish holds it in the hollow of his hand. This is the highest degree of despatching that has been reached in America. It is perfect in its way, and all Americans are justly proud of it, although as a marvel of human skill and despatching excellence it is not to be compared with the despatching of the Franco-German war by von Moltke, when over a million men were despatched, and empire-making and destroying battles were fought at a predetermined time and place, with predetermined victory for the great despatcher, predetermined defeat for his less skilled opponent.

The big task was carried through because of perfect preparation. The German army had no track, no perfect locomotives, no built and tested signal towers, but it had a perfectly working organization that had not omitted to give attention to every little detail.

In America we fail in details. We step from the 18-hour train and we enter a railroad shop. We ask, "Do you despatch your work here?" —

"No, this is a repair shop. We rarely do the same thing twice. Despatching is all very well for a daily train running every day in the year, but it would never apply in a repair shop." The official in charge with ill-disguised skepticism enquires whether the questioner is a railroad man, whether he understands the peculiarities of railroad operation. We say nothing, but we wonder whether a surgeon without railroad experience could take out a railroad man's appendix. Has the official fully grasped the fact that as to most of life facts, as to the fundamentals of conception, gestation, birth, nutrition, growth, development, he is one with his cousins, the other mammals ; that as to most of the balance he is one with his human brothers, and that even if he had the special talent of a Paderewski, he could not play without hands, nor compose if he had the toothache, nor appear in public barefoot? We wonder that the official does not see that the laws of order, of sequence, of rhythm, of balance, and several others are superior to all minor peculiarities. Once when I was suddenly stricken in a railroad shop and was taken, distorted with pain, in an ambulance in my grimy, disheveled clothes to a railroad hospital, they thought I was a tramp who had fallen off a brake beam, but neither I nor they were worried about my official standing as they tried to mitigate the sufferings of a sick man.

To return, not to this railroad shop, but to the other where the doubting official is standing, I suddenly see a man shaping a small piece of steel about the size of a visiting card. I do not know what it is for, but in thirty seconds I notice that the moving tool is cutting air three inches and cutting metal one inch; efficiency of stroke is therefore about 30 per cent, with due allowance for clearance at each end. I ask the man what kind of tool steel he is using, and he answers "blue chip," but this means nothing to him, as instead of making blue chips his metal chips are dull gray. His cutting speed is about one-third of what it

ought to be, therefore efficiency of speed is 33 per cent. His tool is diamond-pointed and his feed is 1/64 inch. He should have used a round-nosed tool and the feed should have been 1/16 inch, so that the efficiency of feed is 2? per cent. His depth of cut is as thin as he can make it, so he takes* three so-called roughing cuts and then a finishing cut when one deep roughing cut and a broad, scraping, finishing cut would have answered. His efficiency on depth of cut is not over 50 per cent. The time efficiency of the whole job is therefore 30 X 33 X 25 X 50 = 1.25 per cent— but a little over one per cent. These are the visible inefficiencies. I surmise a number of others that I do not see. I suspect that perhaps the piece was not needed at all, that some worker or foreman is doing some unauthorized experimental work ; I suspect that the piece needs no such finish. I have too often seen infinitesimal cuts, followed by file and emery cloth, put on a piece that is then flung down on the rough floor and badly dented with no apparent inter-ference with its usefulness. I have seen a scraping tool put on locomotive tires, taking off tissue-paper-thin scrapings, when every-body who thinks a minute knows that car axles (a much more important surface) are often given a rolling finish, and that locomotive tires, however rough, would roll smooth before the engine had rolled out of the shop. I have seen a railroad shop man put hours of work and use $600 of material on a replacement when a $27 repair would have abundantly answered the purpose, a man not heeding the Scripture in-junction not to put a patch of new cloth on an old garment lest the garment be weaker than before. Why continue these painful examples ?

The railroad that despatches its crack trains with 99 per cent of time accuracy has either no despatch system or a very crude one for work, either big or small, through its shops; therefore in some cases it fails to realize an efficiency of even 1 per cent, and on the big average of all shop work fails to realize either a time or cost efficiency of more than 40 per cent. Our universe would not last very long if only the stars were despatched. It is the despatching of our daily meals, the despatching work of ferments, of bacteria, of protozoa, of molecules and of atoms, that counts. A firm in Chicago has taken a million-dollar contract to bring out a new edition of a great encyclopedia. All the work is despatched. Conditions were standardized, operations were standardized, each volume, each page, each column, each line, each letter is despatched, even as the proper lubrication of each car axle is part of the proper despatching of the 18-hour train.

Many years ago on the Yukon I said to a river-steamer owner: "I suppose you much prefer passengers to freight. If you run on a sand bar, the passengers can get off and help you to put the steamer afloat." He told me plainly, forcibly and picturesquely that I did not know what I was talking about. If a passenger boat stuck on a bar, the passengers did nothing but grumble and cause trouble, and the only way they lightened the load was by eating more of the food, but a load of freight would not complain if it not only ran on a sand bar but in addition was caught in the ice and remained all winter.

Railroad despatching as to passenger trains is of a very high order of excellence; as to freight forwarding it is gradually emerging from the dark ages, perishable freight going forwards almost with passenger regularity; wrecks, slides, snow are taken care of with a despatch of the highest order of excellence; railroads are even built on schedule time; but considering the expenditures that are not despatched and those that are inefficiently despatched, the general despatching efficiency, even of railroads, is not over 40 per cent, yet there are few activities that do as well as rail-roads. The reasons the despatching efficiency is so low are many, but chief among them are lack of proper type of organization, and failure to apply principles as distinguished from empirical makeshifts*

Nevertheless, there are very few other activities scheduled as far in advance and as accurately as train despatching. Newspaper offices furnish wonderful examples of scheduled work, so also do theatres, and perhaps the most wonderful of all are the weather reports, gathered over an area of four million square miles, com-piled, digested and distributed within a few hours of receipt. But most of the industrial plants of the world are still in the stage of civilization of which as to transportation the old freight wagons and prairie schooners across the plains were types. They started when they got ready, they arrived some time,

and nobody knew where they were nor what route they were taking in between.

There is one collection of industrial shops in the United States in which schedules and despatching have been so perfected that the work is planned ahead three months and the particular job that each man is to do at 4 o'clock or any other hour for any day is known. Planning long in advance is convenient, but is not an essential part of scientific despatching. A barber shop is scientifically despatched from minute to minute, and a customer entering can figure very closely on the time that he will be able to leave.

Railroad despatching remains, however, the most extended and striking example of advance planning and daily realization. It seemed, quite obvious, therefore, to extend these rail-road principles of despatching to the operations in a railroad shop. Railroad officials fully understood what despatching meant, were accustomed to work under its rules. It proved, nevertheless, a very difficult task. In the running of trains a very great deal precedes despatching. There is a carefully worked out schedule which has been more or less tried out for months. How many of these conditions are present in the industrial shop? Where are the standardized conditions, where are the standardized operations? Where the discipline, the maintenance, the schedules?

Railroad shops as to despatching are in the same backward condition as most industrial shops. Therefore it was found that despatching by itself could not be immediately applied, that many other preparations were necessary, that if the application of other principles was worked out, despatching would become easy.

The application of principles will change a mob into an army, whether in field or shop. The frenzy of a mob shows itself in a lynching, but the courage of an army ought to be highest in defeat. When men, foremen, officials, equipment, supplies, had been subjected for a year to the operation of principles, a beginning was made of despatching locomotive repairs. The subject was attacked from both ends at once. Locomotives were worth a great deal to the road, a day's service being estimated at $35; therefore the first plan was to despatch the repairs as a whole, locomotives to be returned to service in 12 days, 18 days, 24 days, according to the class of repair. The second plan, worked in with this, was to despatch each separate item of work and to pick out those items which, taken at the proper time, in the proper

order, and in the proper sequence, would result in completing a locomotive in the shortest time.

It is interesting to note in the matter of re-pairs the great superiority of marine-repair despatching over locomotive-repair despatching. A big vessel will be put in a dry dock, at $5,000 a day charge perhaps, and be completely scraped, repainted, new propeller and rudder fitted, new plates inserted, in perhaps three days. Complete circulating pumps, from drawing to installation, will be completed in three days. Where individual operations are summed up, many of which can go on concurrently, it is hard to defend a longer time than 72 hours for most locomotive repairs.

It is also interesting to note that in the sister branch of railroad maintenance, namely, track repairs, stupendous tasks of snow and landslide removals, bridge rebuilding, etc., are commonly accomplished in hours rather than in days or weeks.

It is evident that brain must count for more than muscle in attempting to apply despatching to locomotive repairs. We had to know that men would be available, therefore discipline and the fair deal both had to be strengthened ; ideals of order, of promptness, of economy had to be instilled ; common sense had to be applied ; records had to be started, but other principles also had to be applied. Conditions of all kinds had to be standardized, operations had to be standardized, schedules had to be made out, and definite instructions had to be issued. It ite instructions had to be issued. It is really very much easier to apply a few principles than to remedy several million defects. The easiest way is to forget these defects in the past, ignore them for the present, but constantly obviate them for the future.

A new plan was gradually substituted for the old plan. In the railroad shop major schedules were worked out and put into effect by despatching; minor and subsidiary schedules were made out for each job, each man, and each machine, the lesser jobs fitting like parts of a puzzle into the larger schedules, and on the basis of schedules, however often they were changed, men, machines and jobs were despatched. All work, instead of passing directly from foreman to worker or to gang, passed through our despatch board. Practice was perfectly elastic, but procedure was not. Schedules could be changed on a moment's notice and also the sequence of despatching, but not the fact of despatching. The particular shape and size and location of despatch board is unimportant, the essential being that it is suited to the work. Whether the despatch board is covered with parti-colored strings, or made up of hooks, clips, or pockets to receive cards, is also unimportant in principle, but not in practice, since a method under which many of your despatching cards blow out of the window soon becomes inoperative.

The name despatching was adopted from train despatching, and train operation organization was adapted. The foreman corresponded to the engineer, a new official was created corresponding to the despatcher, a messenger and telephone service kept the despatcher's office in touch with the work. Despatching records, however, were adapted from bank practice. The receiving teller takes in money, he enters the amount in the depositor's time book, he credits the bank's cash book with the amount received, but he also credits the ledger account of the depositor. When the depositor draws a check it is presented to the paying teller who hands out the cash, charges the cash account, charges the depositor's account. At the end of any day the total cash in hand must correspond with the sum of the balances in all the accounts. Similarly the despatching board, like the cash book, is filled with prospective work. As fast as any item is performed it is charged to the order. The operator is charged with the pay he draws and credited with the work he performs.

There must be at the day's or week's or month's end a perfect balance between all work credited to operators and charged to orders, also a perfect balance between wages and other accounts charged and totals credited to work in progress and delivered since last balance. The records are immediate, absolutely accurate, and wholly adequate. (These are cost records. Cost charged to orders must be equal to wages credited to operators' accounts).

In practice it has proved more important to despatch unstandardized work than to standardize undespatched work, even as on railroads it is more important to despatch trains even if there is no adherence to schedule than it is to run trains on time without despatching.

Despatching, like other principles, is a sub-division of the science of management, a part of planning; but while visible to the eye as a distinct pattern, it ought, like inlaid work, to be intactile. If we are well nothing is more beautifully despatched than the food we eat, from plate to building up of depleted hidden tissue. We are conscious only of the pleasure of the first taste, not conscious of the admirably regular way by which each molecule is ultimately despatched to its destination.

Chapter VIII THE SIXTH PRINCIPLE: RELIABLE, IMMEDIATE, ADEQUATE, AND PERMANENT RECORDS

Chapter X THE EIGHTH PRINCIPLE: STANDARDS AND SCHEDULES