Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

46 EFFICIENCY METHODS the happy days for manufacturing industries, when profits were so large and left so comfortable a margin that any extra expenditure to ascertain real costs was quite unnecessary. The days of easy profit-making are evidently over. The tendency in all modern costing systems is towards greater detail, towards careful following up and comparing, not only the cost of individual parts, but even of isolated operations on individual parts. However, firms engaged in the manufacture of a highly-varied product find themselves at a dis- advantage with regard to their costing analysis, as variation in product means variation in processes, and the analysis becomes highly complex and expensive. At the same time there can be no doubt here of the necessity for accurate costing, if the concern is to be commercially and financially stable. The efficiency engineer, faced by the question of expense, finds assistance first by developing that aspect of Taylor’s idea of functional foremanship which puts all machines of a similar nature together, and so simplifies analysis (see the next chapter). Secondly, by adjusting and altering the routine in the cost office, and using various labour-saving devices, he is enabled to use unskilled labour, usually that of girl clerks, to a great extent there ; which will mean considerable economy. (Of course at the present time any devices to use female instead of male clerks will be obviously popular.) However, the strong position of the efficiency engineer here is not in any claim to economy in the