Principles of Industrial Engineering

nt of manufacture on a wholesale scale; and in connection with this the re-apportionment of duties among the artisans employed, so that it has become general for each to do only some limited special part of the whole process of manufacture, and to do this by repetitive reproduction of a fixed pattern. While this has vastly reduced costs of production and facilitated manufacture per se, it .is evident that from the works-management point of view it introduces very serious problems. One is merely quantitative; the great size of a modern factory makes it impossible for the manager to oversee it all in person. Another is the division of operations among different workmen or departments. Each single thing manufactured starts, or may start, in as many different places as it has parts, each part again being not an individual but one of a lot of like parts; and such a lot of identical parts, though they start off together through the shop, may later on be divided and sub-divided and diverge to various finished products if they happen to be standard to more than one pattern. The workman actually engaged on the job has no idea of the destination of his work and no responsibility beyond finishing his own individual job to the standard pattern and quality, and perhaps within'some standard time. Take a pocket knife for illustration. It has a blade of a certain size and shape, which probably is used not only in the one pattern of knife we happen to be considering, but also i...