Sam Adams, Industrial Engineer

If you ask my mother how I happened to become an industrial engineer, she'll tell you that I have always been one.

She means that I have always wanted everything to be well organized and neat. When I was still in elementary school, I liked to keep my socks in the upper left-hand drawer of my bureau, my underwear in the upper right drawer, shirts in the middle drawer, and pants, neatly folded, in the bottom drawer.

In fact, I was the efficiency expert for the whole family. I used to organize my father's tools, my mother's kitchen utensils, my sister's boyfriends.

• utensil: a tool with a particular use, especially in a kitchen or house.（尤指厨房或家用的）器具，用具。

I needed to be efficient. I wanted to be well organized. For me, there was a place for everything and everything was always in its place. These qualities gave me a good foundation for a career in industrial engineering.

Unfortunately, I was also a bit bossy and I wasn't a very good listener. You'll see what I mean when I tell you about my first project I ever did after I finished my bachelor's degree at the university.

After graduation I returned home to my small town in Indiana. I didn't have a job yet. Mr. Hobbs, a friend of my father's, owned a small shirt factory in town. Within past five years it had grown from twenty to eighty workers. Mr. Hobbs was worried about his plant was getting too big and inefficient, so he asked me to come in on a short-term basis as a consultant.

I went to the plant and spent about a week looking around and making notes. I was really amazed what I saw.

Most curious of all, there was no quality control whatsoever. No one inspected the final product of the factory. As a result some of the shirts that were put in boxes for shipment were missing one or two buttons, the collar, even a sleeve sometimes!

The working conditions were poor. The tables where the workers sat were very high and uncomfortable. Except for a half hour at lunchtime, there were no breaks in the day to relieve the boring work. There was no music. The walls of the workrooms were a dull gray color. I was amazed that the workers hadn't gone on strike.

Furthermore, the work flow was irregular. There was one especially absent-minded young man in the assembly line who sewed on buttons. After a while I recognized him as "Big Jim", who used to sit behind me in math class in high school. He was very slow and all the shirts were held up at his position. Workers beyond him in line on his shift had to wait with nothing to do; therefore, a great deal of time and efficiency were lost as Big Jim daydreamed while he worked. All week I wondered why he wasn't fired.

After I made observations for a week, Mr. Hobbs asked me for an oral report of my findings. I covered my major points by telling him the following:

"If you have a quality control inspection, you will greatly improve your finished product."

"If the assembly line is redesigned, a smooth work flow can be achieved and time and energy can be saved."

"If you decrease the height of the worktables, the machine operators will work more comfortably."

"If the management provides pleasant background music and beautifies the dull setting, the factory will be much more productive."

"If the workers have a fifteen-minute coffee break in the morning and afternoon, they will be more efficient."

"If excellent work results in frequent pay increases or promotions, the worker will have greater incentive to produce."

Mr. Hobbs thanked to me for this report and told me he would talk over my suggestions with his brother, the co-owner and manager of the factory. "We're interested in progress here", he said. "We want to keep up with times." He also give me a check with $100 and a box of shirts with his compliments.

Jane: Hi Sam. How's everything?

Sam: Great to see you, Jane.

Jane: I hear you got a new job with Babson Machines.

Same: Yes, it's true. I was really lucky. I started about six months ago; they haven't fired me yet. How's the factory?

Jane: Ah, about the same as always.

Sam: You mean shirts are still coming out without collars or buttons?

Jane: Sometimes it's just the collars and buttons without the shirts. The plant isn't famous for its efficiency, you know.

Sam: Well, I heard there are some changes at the factory. Something about music and a coffee break in the afternoons.

Jane: Music? Oh yeah. Yeah, I guess there is. A lot of good it does, though. The machines make so much noise we can't hear it anyway. And the coffee break! They give us only five minutes. If we run at top speed we can just make it to the coffee machine and back to our worktable.

Sam: I can't believe this. I understood that Mr. Hobbs was all ready to make a lot of big changes down there in factory.

Jane: Well, a couple of things changed. We used to have dull gray walls to look at between operations. A couple of weeks ago, some painter came in and painted a huge picture of a perfect shirt... with all its buttons, sleeves, and the collar. I guess management wanted to remind us of what we are supposed to be producing there. But can you imagine? A shirt! We see enough shirts all day. We don't need to look up from our work and find one painted on the walls.

Sam: You mean that big shirt doesn't make all of you want to produce more?

Jane: A lot of pictures might make us to produce more, but a huge painted shirt? No way! On yes, one other change. Remember Big Jim in our math class? He used to work on buttons and he held up half the assembly line. Well, they promoted him from buttons to sleeves, with a raise in pay. Now he sits at the beginning of the line and holds up everyone. There's progress for you.

Sam: Ah, yes, progress: one step forward and two steps back!

So I learned that my consultation at the shirt factory had not improved production.

Well, frankly, I'm not surprised. You see, while working at the Babson Machine Company as an industrial adviser, I took a night class in management engineering at Northwestern University. My company paid the bill. I like that.

Now I have a quite a different idea of what it means to be a "consultant". I used to think that the consultant goes into the factory, studies the problems, suggests cures for the problems, and then encourages the management to follow these suggestions.

I now believe that consultation doesn't work successfully that way. In my management engineering course I learned that first I have to listen. In the shirt factory I should have listened to the management, the two owners. But then, together, we should have listened to the workers themselves. What did they think the problems were? What were their suggestions for solutions?

I tried to force my suggestions on the owners. The suggestions for improvement weren't theirs or the workers'. If workers and management are seriously involved in the problem solving, change is not only possible, but inevitable.

At any rate, although the experience was painful in many ways, it provided a good lesson for me.

I'm thinking of sending the check for $100 back to Mr. Hobbs. As for the shirts, four of the five in the box didn't fit anyway, and the fifth one didn't have a right sleeve.