Scientific management

Scientific management, also called Taylorism, was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. These include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or merely to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation. The core ideas of scientific management were developed by Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s and were first published in his monographs A Piece Rate System (1895), Shop Management (1903) and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). While the terms "scientific management" and "Taylorism" are often treated as synonymous, an alternative view considers Taylorism as the first form of scientific management, which was followed by new iterations; thus in today's management theory, Taylorism is sometimes called (or considered a subset of) the classical perspective (meaning a perspective that's still respected for its seminal influence although it is no longer state-of-the-art). Taylorism proper, in its strict sense, became obsolete by the 1930s, and by the 1960s the term "scientific management" had fallen out of favor for describing current management theories. Thus it is a chapter in a larger narrative that includes many ideas and fields, from the folk wisdom of thrift to a profusion of applied-science successors, including time and motion study, the Efficiency Movement (which was the broader cultural echo of scientific management's impact on business managers specifically), Fordism, operations management, operations research, industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, logistics, business process management, business process reengineering, lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma. Two important corollaries flow from this fact: (1) The ideas and methods of scientific management were exactly what was needed to be added to the American system of manufacturing to extend the transformation from craft work (with humans as the only possible agents) to mechanization and automation; but also, (2) Taylor himself could not have known this, and his goals did not include the extensive removal of humans from the production process. In between craft production (with skilled workers) and full automation lies a natural middle ground of an engineered system of extensive mechanization and partial automation mixed with semiskilled and unskilled workers in carefully designed algorithmic workflows. Although Taylor's original inspiration for scientific management was simply to replace inferior work methods with smarter ones, the same process engineering that he pioneered also tends to build the skill into the equipment and processes, removing most need for skill in the workers. Anyone who manages a large team of workers sees from experience that Taylor was correct that some workers could not be relied upon for talent or intelligence; today enterprises still find that talent is a scarce resource. http://amieexamhelp.blogspot.com/

Taylorism took some steps toward addressing their needs (for example, Taylor advocated frequent breaks and good pay), but Taylor nevertheless had a condescending view of less intelligent workers, whom he sometimes compared to draft animals. Some scholars, such as Harry Braverman, insisted that human relations did not replace Taylorism but rather that both approaches were complementaryTaylorism determining the actual organisation of the work process, and human relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures. Clearly a syncretism has occurred since Taylor's day, although its implementation has been uneven, as lean management in capable hands has produced good results for both managers and workers, but in incompetent hands has damaged enterprises. Taylor knew that scientific management could not work (probably at all, certainly never enduringly) unless the workers benefited from the profit increases that it generated. Under Taylorism, workers' work effort increased in intensity. After an attitude survey of the workers revealed a high level of resentment and hostility towards scientific management, the Senate banned Taylor's methods at the arsenal. To whatever extent scientific management caused the strengthening of labor unions by giving workers more to complain about than bad or greedy managers already gave them, it also led to other pressures tending toward worker unhappiness: the erosion of employment in developed economies via both offshoring and automation. Successors such as 'corporate reengineering' or 'business process reengineering' brought into sight the distant goal of the eventual elimination of industry's need for unskilled, and later, perhaps even most skilled human workers in any form, all stemming from the roots laid by Taylorism's recipe for deconstructing a process. Scientific management was naturally appealing to managers of planned economies, because central economic planning relies on the idea that the expenses that go into economic production can be precisely predicted and can be optimized by design. Historian Thomas P. Hughes has detailed the way in which the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s enthusiastically embraced Fordism and Taylorism, importing American experts in both fields as well as American engineering firms to build parts of its new industrial infrastructure. By the 1950s, Taylor's original form of scientific management (and the name "scientific management" itself) had grown dated, but the goals and themes remained attractive and found new avatars. Scientific management was one of the first attempts to systematically treat management and process improvement as a scientific problem. Peter Drucker saw Frederick Taylor as the creator of knowledge management, because the aim of http://amieexamhelp.blogspot.com/

scientific management was to produce knowledge about how to improve work processes. Although the typical application of scientific management was manufacturing, Taylor himself advocated scientific management for all sorts of work, including the management of universities and government.

Engineering management
Engineering management is a specialized form of management that is concerned with the application of engineering principles to business practice. Engineering management is a career that brings together the technological problem-solving savvy of engineering and the organizational, administrative, and planning abilities of management in order to oversee complex enterprises from conception to completion. Largely, engineering managers manage engineers who are driven by non-entrepreneurial thinking, thus require the necessary people skills to coach, mentor and motivate technical professionals. Outside the USA, Istanbul Technical University has a Management Engineering Department established in 1982, offering a number of graduate and undergraduate programs in Management Engineering. The Management of Technology theme builds on the foundation of management topics in accounting, finance, economics, organizational behavior and organizational design. Engineering Management programs typically include instruction in accounting, economics, finance, project management, systems engineering, mathematical modeling and optimization, management information systems, quality control & six sigma, operations research, human resources management, industrial psychology, safety and health. Outside the USA, Istanbul Technical University Management Engineering Department offers an elite undergraduate degree in Management Engineering, attracting top students. Commonly, engineering management consultants are also used when firms require special technical knowledge, though many prefer to use engineering educational consultants for such a task, to upgrade organizational knowledge and in able to keep the intellectual property confidential. Engineering management consulting is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials and/or processes. Engineering management consulting draws upon the principles and methods of engineering analysis and synthesis, as well as the mathematical, physical and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems or processes.

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Engineering management consulting puts a focus on the social impact of the product, process or system that is being analyzed. Examples of where engineering management consulting might be used include designing an assembly workstation, strategizing for various operational logistics, consulting as an efficiency expert, developing a new financial algorithm or loan system for a bank, streamlining operation and emergency room location or usage in a hospital, planning complex distribution schemes for materials or products (referred to as Supply Chain Management), and shortening lines (or queues) at a bank, hospital, or a theme park. Another prominent professional organization in the field is the American Society of Engineering Management (ASEM), which was founded in 1979 by a group of 20 engineering managers from industry. ASEM currently certifies engineering managers (two levels) via the Associate Engineering Manager (AEM) or Professional Engineering Manager (PEM) certifiaction exam. In Canada, the Canadian Society for Engineering Management (CSEM) is a constituent society of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), Canada's oldest learned engineering society.

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