Efforts to apply science to the design of processes and of production systems were made by many people in the 18th

and 19th centuries. They took some time to evolve and to be synthesized into disciplines that we would label with names such as industrial engineering, production engineering, or systems engineering.

Fredrick Winslow Taylor is most often considered as the father of industrial engineering even though all his ideas where not original. ome of the preceding influences may have been Adam Smith's treatise The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Thomas Malthuss Essay on Population, published in 1798, David Ricardos Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, published in 1817, and John Stuart Mills Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848. [1] All of these works provided Classical Liberal explanations for the successes and limitations of the Industrial Revolution.

Adam Smith was an economist as were most of his contemporaries at the time. "Economic Science" is the phrase to describe this field in England prior to American industrialization. The amount of influence this literature had on Taylor is unknown. Another major contributor to the field and precursor to Taylor was Charles W. Babbage. One of his major contributions to the field was his book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers in 1832. In this book he discusses many different topics dealing with manufacturing, a few of which will be extremely familiar to an IE. Babbage discusses the idea of the learning curve, the division of task and how learning is affected, and the effect of learning on the generation of waste. He also was very interested in different methods of wage administration and even suggested profit sharing as a viable approach.

Henry L. Gantt would present papers to the ASME on topics such as cost, selection of workers, training, good incentive plans, and scheduling of work. He is the originator of the Gantt chart, currently the most popular chart used in scheduling of work. Today however, the Gantt chart is coupled with statistics to make more accurate predictions. Other types of charts that have developed out

of the early scheduling efforts are the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and Critical Path Mapping (CPM). Fredrick Winslow Taylor. Taylor is probably the best known of the pioneers in industrial engineering. He used the ASME as present his ideas on the organization of work by management. He coined the term "scientific management" to describe the methods he developed through empirical studies. His work, like others, covered topics such as the organization of work by management, worker selection, training, and additional compensation for those individuals that could meet the standard as developed by the company through his methods.

The Gilbreth family is accredited with the development of time and motion studies. Frank Bunker Gilbreth and his wife Dr. Lillian M. Gilbreth worked on understanding fatigue, skill development, motion studies, as well as time studies.
W. Edwards Deming created new quality-control methods. In 1950, Japanese business leaders invited Deming to Japan to teach executives and engineers about the new methods. Japanese companies quickly adopted his methods, with the result being a commitment to quality control that helped Japanese firms dominate some product markets in many parts of the world.

In 1941 Juran stumbled across the work of Vilfredo Pareto and began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues (for example, 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as "the vital few and the trivial many". In later years Juran preferred "the vital few and the useful many" to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored. He also developed the "Juran's trilogy," an approach to cross-functional management that is composed of three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control and quality improvement. These functions all play a vital role when evaluating quality.
Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations [26] published in 1776 was one of the first works promoting specialization labor to improve productivity. He observed in pin making that the division of task into four separate operations increased output by a factor of almost five. Whereas one worker performing all the operations produced 1000 pins per day, ten workers employed on four more specialized tasks could produce 48,000 pins per day. The concept of designing a process to use the work force efficiently had arrived.

It should be noted, however, that what worked for one process (e.g., pin manufacture) in 1776 may not work well for a similar process today. Manufacturing cells, for example, in coomon use today represent a reversal of this same concept (i.e., de-departementalization of processes), whereby a manufacturing cell permits in integrated processing of all materials for a product within a single area of the plant. Such de-departementalization greatly reduces the material handling cost of the product during its manufacture, inventory costs, and throughput time, and creates a sense of ownership among those producing the product. Determining the best balance of costs in the manufacture of a product is what industrial engineering is all about.

Arround the turn of this century, Henry Ford, on observing carcasses on a moving slat conveyor in a slaughterhouse, got the idea for progressive assembly of automobiles by use of conveyors. Conveyors are so much a part of our industrial heritage that it becomes necessary in an industrial engineering course dealing with materials handling to offer a case study for which the use of conveyors is a poor choice of approach. This shock seems necessary to convince studebts that conveyors help most of the time but not all of time; in fact, in many Just-In-Tiem (JIT) installations today, conveyor removal becomes part of the plan. There is little question that the mass production of Ford automobiles gave considerable impetus to the mass production concept in the United States.