From Frederick Taylor's Piece Rate System - 1895 - Part 3
Cooperation, or profit sharing, has entered the mind of many managers. There have been certain instances, both in England and France., of at least a partial success of cooperative experiments.
But many cooperative experiments have failed for several reasons. The first and most important of which is, that no form of cooperation has yet been devised in which each individual is allowed free scope for his personal ambition. The second and almost equally strong reason for failure lies in the remoteness of the reward. The average workman (I don’t say all men) cannot look forward to a profit which is six months or a year away.
The fundamental and perfectly legitimate aims of men and proprietors are:
On the part of the men, —
THE UNIVERSAL DESIRE TO RECEIVE THE LARGEST POSSIBLE WAGES FOR THEIR TIME ;
And on the part of the employers, —
THE DESIRE TO RECEIVE THE LARGEST POSSIBLE RETURN FOR THE WAGES PAID ;
It is the opinion of the writer that the basis for harmonious cooperation lies in the two following facts :
First . That the workmen in nearly every trade can and will materially increase their present output per day, providing they are assured of a permanent and larger return for their time than they have heretofore received.
Second. That the employers can well afford to pay higher wages per piece even permanently, providing each man and machine in the establishment turns out a proportionately larger amount of work.
It is well recognized fact that, in most lines of manufacture, the indirect expenses equal or exceed the wages paid directly to the workmen, and that these expenses remain approximately constant, whether the output of the establishment is great or small. From this it follows that it is always cheaper to pay higher wages to the workmen when the output is proportionately increased: the diminution in the indirect portion of the cost per piece being greater than the increase in wages. Many manufacturers, in considering the cost of production, fail to realize the effect that the volume of output has on the cost. They lose sight of the fact that taxes, insurance, depreciation, rent, interest, salaries, office expenses, miscellaneous labor, sales expenses, and frequently the cost of power (which in the aggregate amount to as much as wages paid to workmen), remain about the same whether the output of the establishment is great or small.
Let us consider the obstacles in the path of harmonious cooperation, and suggest a method for their removal.
39. The most formidable obstacle is the lack of knowledge on the part of both the men and the management (but chiefly the latter) of the quickest time in which each piece of work can be done; or, briefly, the lack of accurate time-tables for the work of the place.
40. The remedy for this trouble lies in the establishment in every factory of a proper rate-fixing department; a department which shall have equal dignity and command equal respect with the engineering and managing departments, which shall be organized and conducted in an equally scientific and practical manner. (We can interpret it as equal in importance to engineering (product and process) and operations management or production management).
41. The rate-fixing, as at present conducted, even in our best managed establishments, is very similar to the mechanical engineering of fifty or sixty years ago. Mechanical engineering at that time consisted in imitating machines which were in more or less successful use, or in guessing at the dimensions and strength of the parts of a new machine ; and as the parts broke down or gave out, in replacing them with the stronger ones. Thus each new machine presented a problem almost independent of former designs, and one which could only be solved by months or years of practical experience and a series of break-downs.
Modern engineering, however, has become a study, not of individual machines, but of the resistance of materials, the fundamental principles of mechanics, and of the elements of design.
42. On the other hand, the ordinary rate-fixing (even the best of it), like the old-style engineering, is done by a foreman or superintendent who, with the aid of a clerk, looks over the record of the time in which a whole job was done as nearly like the new one as can be found, and then guesses at the time required to do the new job. No attempt is made to analyze and time each of the classes of work, or elements (machine and man) of which a job is composed; although it is a far simpler task to resolve each job into its elements, to make a careful study of the quickest time in which each of the elementary operations can be done, and then to properly classify, tabulate, and index this information, and use it when required for rate-fixing, than it is to fix rates, with even an approximation to justice, under the common system of guessing.
43. In fact, it has never occurred to most superintendents that the work of their establishments consists of various combinations of elementary operations which can be timed in this way; and a suggestion that this is a practical way of dealing with the piece-work problem usually meets with derision, or, at the best, with the answer that “ It might do for some simple business, but my work is entirely too complicated.”
44. Yet this elementary system of fixing rates has been in successful operation for the past ten years, on work complicated in its nature and covering almost as wide a range of variety as any manufacturing that the writer knows of. In 1883, while foreman of the machine shop of the Midvale Steel Company of Philadelphia, it occurred to the writer that it was simpler to time each of the elements of the various kinds of work done in the place, and then find the quickest time in which each job could be done, by summing up the total times of its component parts, than it was to search through the records of former jobs and guess at the proper price. After practising this method of rate-fixing himself for about a year as well as circumstances would permit, it became evident that the system was a success. The writer then established the rate-fixing department, which has given out piece-work prices in the place ever since.
45. This department far more than paid for itself from the very start; but it was several years before the full benefits of the system were felt, owing to the fact that the best methods of making and recording time observations of work done by the men, as well as of determining the maximum capacity of each of the machines in the place (by determining machine element times), and of making working-tables and time-tables, were not at first adopted.
46. Before the best results were finally attained in the case of work done by metal-cutting tools, such as lathes, planers, boring mills, etc., a long and expensive series of experiments was made, to determine, formulate, and finally practically apply to each machine the law governing the proper cutting speed of tools, namely, the effect on the cutting speed of altering any one of the following variables : the shape of the tool (i.e., lip angle, clearance angle, and the line of the cutting edge), the duration of the cut, the quality or hardness of the metal being cut, the depth of the cut, and the thickness of the feed or shaving.
47. It is the writer’s opinion that a more complicated and difficult piece of rate-fixing could not be found than that of determining the proper price for doing all kinds of machine work on miscellaneous steel and iron castings and forgings, which vary in their chemical composition from the softest iron to the hardest tool steel. Yet this problem was solved through the rate-fixing department and the “ differential rate,” with the final result of completely harmonizing the men and the management, in place of the constant war that existed under the old system. At the same time the quality of the work was improved and the output of the machinery and the men was doubled, and in many cases trebled. At the start there was naturally great opposition to the ratefixing department, particularly to the man who was taking time observations of the various elements of the work; but when the men found that the rates were fixed without regard to the records of the quickest time in which they had actually done each job, and that the knowledge of the department was more accurate than their own, the motive for hanging back or “ soldiering ” on this work ceased, and with it the greatest cause for antagonism and war between the men and the management
48. As an illustration of the great variety of work to which elementary rate-fixing has already been successfully applied, the writer would state that while acting as general manager of two large sulphite pulp mills he directed the application of piece-work to all of the complicated operations of manufacturing throughout one of these mills, by means of elementary rate-fixing, with the result, within eighteen months, of more than doubling the output of the mill.
The difference between elementary rate-fixing and the ordinary plan can perhaps be best explained by a simple illustration. Suppose the work to be planing a surface on a piece of cast iron. In the ordinary system the rate-fixer would look through his records of work done by the planing machine, until he found a piece of work as nearly as possible similar to the proposed job, and then guess at the time required to do the new piece of work. Under the elementary system, however, some such analysis as the following would be made :
Work done by Man. Minutes.
Time to lift piece from floor to planer table — - ■
Time to level and set work true on table
Time to put on stops and bolts —
Time to remove stops and bolts
Time to remove piece to floor
Time to clean machine “■
Work done by Machine . Minutes .
Time to rough off cut X in* thick, 4 feet long, 2 X in. wide . t
Time to rough off cut % in. thick, 3 feet long, 12 in. wide etc. -■
Time to finish cut 4 feet long, 2# in. wide
Time to finish cut 3 feet long, 12 in. wide, etc —
Total
Add per cent, for unavoidable delays
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It is evident that this job consists of a combination of elementary operations, the time required to do each of which can be readily determined by observation or formula calcuation.
This exact combination of operations may never occur again, but elementary operations similar to these will be performed in differing combinations almost every day in the same shop.
A man whose business it is to fix rates soon becomes so familiar with the time required to do each kind of elementary work performed by the men, that he can write down the time even from memory.
In the case of that part of the work which is done by the machine, the rate-fixer refers to tables which are made out for each machine, and from which he takes the time required for any combination of breadth, depth, and length of cut.
It is evident that this job consists of a combination of elementary operations, the time required to do each of which can be readily determined by observation or formula calcuation.
This exact combination of operations may never occur again, but elementary operations similar to these will be performed in differing combinations almost every day in the same shop.
A man whose business it is to fix rates soon becomes so familiar with the time required to do each kind of elementary work performed by the men, that he can write down the time even from memory.
In the case of that part of the work which is done by the machine, the rate-fixer refers to tables which are made out for each machine, and from which he takes the time required for any combination of breadth, depth, and length of cut.
Thus Taylor described the department that he set up for making experiments for developing productivity science, doing productivity engineering, determining the maximum output possible from each machine and doing productivity management through task assignments along with specified times for each element of the task and an incentive in the form of differential piece rate for completing the task in the specified time. This department only in the latter days became industrial engineering department. But in the evolution, the focus on manual work increased and machine effort got neglected.
Source
Frederick Taylor's Piece Rate System - 1895 - Part 3
Frederick Taylor's Piece Rate System - 1895 - Part 4
Engineering Elements Examined by Taylor apart from Task Elements.
Ud. 6.3.2022
Pub. 10.9.2021
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