Frederick W. Taylor

Member of the American of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), much impressed by the concepts offered by Towne (Henry Towne of the Yale and Towne Company published a paper Transactions f the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, stressed the need for engineers o be concerned with the econoimic effects of their decisions), was Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor have ofetn been referred to as the "father of industrial Engineering". Taylor offered the concept that it was an engineering responsibility to design, measure, plan, and schedule work.
Taylor, influenced by both Towne and Wentworth, developed the concept that work design, work measurement, production scheduling, and other staff functions were engineering responsibilities. His attempts to implement his concepts revolutionized industrial productivity.
Even more important than the improvement in shoveling productivity was the concept of applying engineering analysis to human work situations. Taylor initiated the practice of performing an engineering analysis of work requirements specifying the exact method, tools, and equipment to be employed, and then training the worker to perform the opearations as specified.
He eventually determined an optimum method of selected workers to perform this task and carefully trained them to perform the task, exactly as he specified. As a result of his analysis, dramatic changes in pig iron handling productivity resulted.
Analysis of the work requirements and specifications for a method to perform an operation is now called work design or methods study. However, Taylor also pioneered the activity we now generally call work measurement. This activity is concerned with determining the amount of time an operator should be allowed for performing an operation.
Taylor invented stopwatch timestudy, which is still used extensively to determine the time to perform an operation, commonly referred to today as a time standard. Taylor development of timestudy led to time standards, which are the underlying basis for control of labor costs and are a necessary input to scheduling and pricing activities in industry.
Industrial Engineering, which represents the science of operations, has not been embraced by many responsible for operations today; they choose to deny its existence a century after its initiation. they choose to believe that operation simply require common sense. the history of engineering is replete with such attitudes. There are firms just today discovering that industrial engineering effectively deals with problems they have been unable to solve effectively throughout their past. In a sense, even today, in some firms, doing industrial engineering work ia a bit like doing missionary work.