Vol. V, No. 6. November, 1954
By D. G. Malcolm
By M. E. Salveson
By George A. Jaggers
Industrial Engineering, The Media Of Management Control
By GEORGE A. JAGGERS
President, Monarch Manufacturing Company, Fort Worth, Texas
Prior to 1910 problems of Industrial Engineering were discussed only in The
American Society of Mechanical Engi- neers. It was before that society that
the papers of Taylor, Gilbreth and Gantt were read. In 1910, several members of
the Mechanical Engineering Society began to meet separately for the discussion
of management problems. The group in- cluded Gilbreth, Barth, Cooke and Hath-
away. In 1912, out of this society, the Society to Promote the Science of Man-
agement was formally organized. The membership of the society increased to
more than a hundred by 1917.
During World War I, the name was changed to the Taylor Society, and in 1936 the Tay-
lor Society amalgamated with the So- ciety for Industrial Engineers to form the Society for the Advancement of Management. This group flourished and still meets regularly to review detailed
problems in management. And finally, as recently as 1948 your organization, the American Institute of Industrial En- gineers was founded.
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles defines an industrial engineer as follows:
A classification title for engineers who supervise production departments of manu- facturing plants, lay out machinery and apparatus and determine flow of work for most efficient production, conduct and_ in- terpret time-and-motion studies, devise means and set up programs to curb industrial acci-
dents and fires, set up personnel policies and procedures and evaluate jobs and devise and
install accounting and inventory-control sys- tems. The definition adds: May specialize in
such fields as setting up production cost records and control systems, developing jigs
and fixtures, training production personnel, and wage administration. The definition fur-
ther adds: The following jobs are typical of those classified under this title: efficiency
engineer, factory lay-out-man, methods engi-neer, production engineer II, safety engineer,
time-study engineer, management engineer. This list of subtitles, all directly or
indirectly related to the Industrial Engi- neering field, is at best, confusing.
I be- lieve that the Industrial Engineer’s prin- cipal functions are threefold, and I offer
for your consideration a brief, simple description of these three functions.
First, the competent Industrial Engi neer is an analyst. He is trained and dis- ciplined in the objective study of known or projected situations for the purpose of properly identifying the various fac-
tors which may be involved, and _ to separate the constituent elements in each factor so that they may be considered separately, or in relation to the whole.
Secondly, he is a planner. The facts, ascertained through analysis and _ pro- perly assembled, tend to point the way for proper planning to attain a desired result. The analyst, therefore, is the
first to visualize the plan necessary for corrective measures, or the plan most likely to assure success of a given proj- ect.
And thirdly, he is a controller in the sense that he well knows that any plan must incorporate features of comparison and verification to measure progress and results, and he is well informed as to
the most efficient methods which may be employed.
These terms—analyst, planner, con- troller—are familiar to top management, and indicate to them a pattern of work to be performed for which they recog- nize a need. Likewise, the terms are un-
derstandable to the small business man who might be interested in engaging the services of an Industrial Engineer, if there were a clear understanding of the services to be rendered.
The Industrial Engineer should specialize in that area of management having to do with the
design and manufacture of product. This would encompass all of the ramifications both directly and indirectly associated with the production of product of stan- dard quality and cost; whereas the man-
agement engineer should specialize in that area of management involving sales, marketing, finance, policies, organization, and problems in reorganization and mer- gers. Neither of these definitions sug-
gests imposed limitations, but represent logical deductions I have made as a re- sult of having been associated with both branches of the profession.
The problem is to establish a means
whereby the thinking and planning of
top management may be converted into
a controlled and positive plan of action.
This is especially difficult in planning
the manufacturing operations. Early in
my career, I recognized this problem to
be of critical importance to top manage-
ment and noted at that time that limited
progress had been made in this field.
The solution to the problem is the pro-
duction of manufactured goods on a
planned and controlled basis in a definite
and positive manner. With this accom-
plished, we have a plan for manufactur-
ing which becomes part of management’s
master plan for the over-all project of
engineering, sales, manufacturing and
finance.
At least we ‘believe that planning for manu-
facturing is the most complex, and has
a much larger ratio of intangible rami-
fications! By intangible ramifications in
manufacturing, we refer to organization,
morale, working conditions and indus-
trial relations which include the entire
area recently described as “humanics.”
With these various intangible ramifications to be considered in the manufacturing plan, it is of major import that the tangible factors which may be determined accurately through applied technology
should be resolved with a very minimum of error. The tangible factors are the determination of the proper machinery and/or equipment, the design and construction of the necessary tools, jigs
and fixtures, the determination of methods, the establishment of the rate of production, scheduling and routing, evaluation of the various jobs and the es
tablishment of proper job rates, and fin-
ally, the establishment of cost stand-
ards, which includes material, labor and
manufacturing expense.
Unless all variables in this area are
reduced to an absolute minimum, and
adequate means are provided to measure
progress and status, top management
will find it impossible to efficiently meas-
ure and control operations. Having made
its decisions upon unreliable data, man-
agement must trust to chance that the fin-
al accounting will be profitable. In an or-
ganizational structure where the tangibk
factors are separated and portions be-
come the responsibility of independent
department heads, a wide diversity of
opinion will be found as to the most
efficient, economical or satisfactory plan
to be adopted. Assembly of the data sub-
mitted into an over-all plan may not re-
veal this divergence of opinion on de-
tails, and consequently the plan itself will
have inherent weaknesses which will be
revealed in confusion at the time the plan
is executed. Such differences must be
resolved before the plan is adopted, and
resolving the broad general differences
through committees will not suffice. Suc-
cessful execution will depend upon re-
solving the detailed technological pro-
cedures and methods to be employed,
prior to the adoption of the plan. With
the multitude of division heads, depart-
ment heads, engineers, foremen and su
pervisors found in large organizations,
it is practically impossible to obtain
unanimous agreement on the solution of
the problems to be resolved.
By M. T. Headed
By Frank M. Gryna, Jr.
By Marvin E. Mundell and Irwin P. Lazarus
