Life and Influence of Frederick Taylor

The Life and Influence of Frederick Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), founder of scientific management, was born in Philadelphia. He came from a Quakers family with rigid principles and he was educated with a disciplinary mentality, devotion to work and savings. During his first studies, he had direct contact with social and business problems that arise since the industrial revolution. He started his professional life as a common laborer in 1878 at the Midvale Steel Co., he started as a shop clerk and quickly progressed to machinist, foreman, maintenance foreman, and chief draftsman; he became chief engineer in 1885. At the time, the pay per piece or per task system was used. Taylor introduced then the piece-work in the factory. His goal was to find the most efficient way to perform specific tasks. He closely watched how work was done and would then measure the quantity produced (Kanigel 44).

Taylor believed that the secret of productivity was finding the right challenge for each person, and then paying him well for increased output. At Midvale, he used time studies to set daily production quotas; incentives would be paid to those reaching their daily goal. Those who did not reach their goal would get the differential rate, a much lower pay. Taylor doubled productivity using time study, systematic controls and tools, functional foremanship, and his new wage scheme. He paid the person not the job. He stayed at Midvale until 1889.

Later, he joined Bethlehem Steel Company. He registered about fifty patents of machines inventions, tools and work processes. In 1895, he presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers an experimental study named “A note on belting” and no long after, he published “A piece rate system”. Among Taylor’s other contributions to Bethlehem were, a real time analysis of daily output and costs, a modern cost accounting system, reduced yard worker’s ranks from 500 to 140, double stamping mill production, and lowered cost per ton of materials handled from eight cents to four cents. He successfully implemented cost saving techniques even though he added clerks, teachers, time-study engineers, supervision and staffing support positions. While at Bethlehem, Taylor and Manusel White co-developed the Taylor-White system for heat treating chrome-tungsten tool steel, which won Frederick international recognition.

In 1903 his book “Shop Management” was published, in this he focuses in the rationalization techniques of job, through the motion-time study. Claude S. George Junior highlights that what Taylor tried to say in his book Shop Management was:

“1. The objective of a good administration was paying high salaries and having low production costs per unit.

2. In order to realize this objective, management should apply scientific methods of investigation and experimentation