Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

68 EFFICIENCY METHODS of his own management. It is another instance of his astonishing power of seeing exactly an essential factor to secure success in any plan, and then pro- ceeding to supply it by his own investigations and efforts. The pioneer, however, in this instance, was Mr. C. Oberlin Smith, then the President of the Ferra- cute Co., who read a brief suggestive paper on the Naming of Machine Parts at an early meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1881? Mr. C. G. Barth, the mathematician, assisted Dr. Taylor in the development of his classification scheme, and Mr. Thompson contributed important additions. The details of the system may be read, by those interested, in the two articles in Mr. Thompson’s Collection, the second being entitled “ Scientific Management in Retailing.” There is no occasion to elaborate them here.2 Anyone who wishes to instal symbolic classifica- tion is recommended to study the Taylor and the Dewey methods before setting to work to evolve one 1 Trans, of Amer. Soc. of Mechanical Engineers, vol. ii_, p. 366. Reprinted in C. B. Thompson’s Collection before his own paper. 2 The letters I, O, Q are not used. Some systems omit also J and U. We will merely give, as an illustration of the method, the result of an explanation by Mr. Thompson, whereby the written instructions for operating a certain machine in a small printing- plant are discovered to be catalogued as D, C, M, M, K, P,— the operation (P) of the keyboard (K) of the monotype (M), which is a machine (M) in the composing-room (C), part of the manufacturing end (D) of the whole business. (The letter D is the only one arbitrarily chosen without reference to initial letter.) Figures are used at the end of an item to signify par- ticular size or colour, where there are several; they are also used at a specified position among the letters to convey in- formation about dimensions where necessary. The system can claim to be self-expanding and self-indexing, like Dewey’s.