The Evolution of Taylor's Productivity System

F.W. Taylor is the father of industrial engineering, the discipline that focuses on increasing productivity in engineering organizations, engineering departments and engineering processes. No doubt its principles were applied to other activities also. But the core application of industrial engineering discipline has to be engineering activities. Taylor developed his productivity system in stages over a long period of time.

In terms of publications, his first paper is on redesign of belt transmission systems to give less cost. Of course, it improved productivity as there were less breakdowns of belts and hence increased machine availability leading to more production.

In his 1895 paper, he proposed the machine element improvement, method improvement and time study of elements of operations or elemental operations to identify the better ways of doing things in less time. From these best ways of doing elements he developed methods requiring less time and helped operators to do work in less time, producing more in a day. He gave higher wages for extra production. Thus there is machine effort industrial engineering or machine effort redesign. Operators were trained in new machine methods and hence there is human effort industrial engineering.

1903: Shop Management

1911: Scientific Management

An interesting article on productivity

The productivity promisers

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/07311