Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor Biography

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an economist and American industrial engineer, who is considered the father of scientific administration, a forerunner of industrial engineering and recognized for promoting the scientific organization of work. Taylor was born on March 20, 1856, in Philadelphia.

Frederick had to drop out of law school because he presented visual problems that prevented him from doing well in this field. In 1875, he decided to start working in a steel factory in Philadelphia, where he learned from each of the steelmaking processes.

His excellent performance and learning, made Frederick Taylor take a step forward in his work since he later began to lead a machine shop. In his new job, he began to make detailed observations on the work carried out by the workers in charge of cutting metals. Based on his observations, the idea of analyzing the work emerged, dividing each process into smaller, simpler tasks, which had a certain execution time, with which workers were required to perform each task in the established time.

The analysis of the work done by Taylor allowed diminishing in great quantity the spare times in the tasks performed by the workers, and in the changes of processes that also involved changes of tools. Taylor also established a salary per piece manufactured, in relation to the estimated time spent, which was a motivation to improve the pace of work. This strategy helped to end little by little with the dispute between workers and bosses, by productivity standards.

“Ideas move the world only if they have been transformed into feelings before.” Frederick Taylor

After having made some research and work trips, Taylor began again as a student at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he obtained a specialty in Mechanical Engineering in 1883. Between the years 1890 and 1893, he worked as the manager in the manufacturing company of Philadelphia. In 1894, he married Louise M. Spooner.

Frederick Taylor got his engineer title studying at night since in the day he worked at the well-known Pennsylvania steel company Bethlehem Steel Company, where he sought to potentiate his method of analysis of work between 1898 and 1901, to apply it in his workshop. He formed a work team with which he proposed and developed his methods, complementing his innovative ideas with other inventions and published in 1911, his most outstanding book “The Principles of Scientific Management” where he focused on the defense of the scientific organization of work.

By the end of the twentieth century, in the second stage of the industrial revolution, Taylorism and the scientific organization of work achieved widespread expansion by the United States, which was supported by several industrial entrepreneurs, who expected that this method made the controls of their processes grow from the jobs they performed; and simultaneously they increased the productivity using unskilled workers, for more simplified and repetitive manual processes.

PRINCIPLES OF FREDERICK TAYLOR

The principle of planning: To substitute in the work the individual criterion of the operator, the improvisation and the empirical-practical performance by the methods based on scientific procedures. Substitute improvisation for science, by planning the method.

The principle of preparation/planning: Scientifically select workers according to their skills and prepare them, train them to produce more and better, according to the planned method.
Control principle: Control the work to certify that it is being executed in accordance with the established standards and according to the planned plan.
The principle of the execution: To distribute in a different way the attributions and the responsibilities, so that the execution of the work is disciplined.