From the perspective of the production plant itself, increasing scale meant that the work process could be subdivided into an increasing number of work-stations, and the object of F.W. Taylor’s theories on work-organisation was to increase the efficiency of each of these work stations through “scientific management” procedures. This approach towards production organisation dominated from the 1890s until the late 1970s. It even infiltrated the thinking towards the first examples of electronicallyautomated production processes, where new automated machines were seen as “islands of automation”. But, increasingly, the approach towards intra-plant and interfirm production organisation shifted towards a more systemic focus. In the first place, the application of just-in-time principles to production flow made it obvious that striving towards “island-efficiency” often led to bottlenecks and systemic inefficiency (Box 1). This meant that sometimes it was important to tolerate “inefficiency” at a particular point in the production line to achieve plant-efficiency. For example, the objective of reducing inventories (which we now know is pivotal in achieving competitive production) means that individual workers should only continue working if the next stage in the production process required materials; if not, they should stop
and avoid “pushing” additional work-in-progress materials on to the next worker which would only lead to the build-up of work-in-progress. In the process, the individual worker might become less “productive”, but the whole system will be operating with lower inventories, greater responsiveness and higher levels of quality.