Don't be like the manager who got a taste of the savings to be made through the application of mechanical handling equipment. He bought conveyors—and more conveyors. He was DEPUTIZING the handling job to machines. So far, so good. But the first thing you know he had a 50-ft. conveyor connecting two points in his shipping room. It took one man to load it, another to unload it. Previously one man with a hand truck had moved the packages very nicely, and had a lot of time left over for other duties. And here he needed an extra man—and owned a costly piece of equipment to boot. Under such circumstances the conveyor became very expensive scenery—not nearly so nice to look at as Yellowstone Park or the Riviera—and the money invested in it would have bought a trip to either.
Thus all savings through deputization don't pay. Many a machine will save time and labor, but the interest on the investment, and upkeep and the depreciation will more than eat up the saving—UNLESS THE TIME AND LABOR SAVED CAN BE PROFITABLY TURNED TO SOMETHING ELSE.
No attempted exposition of the KNACK OF ORGANIZING can be complete without something more than passing mention of a phase which may be all too easily slid over or completed.
When work is deputized, the responsibility of the manager does not end with the act of deputization. It is the manager's responsibility to see that the work is done in the simplest and most effective manner.
A sales executive had allowed a bunch of call reports to accumulate. There were several hundred of them. So he called in a stenographer whose time was hanging fairly heavily on her hands, and asked her to put them into alphabetical order preparatory to filing.
Fifteen minutes later he happened by and was startled to see that she had covered two desks with the call reports and seemed to be making haste very slowly indeed.
She had made a pile for every last letter in the alphabet. And every time she picked up a report, she had to hunt for the proper pile to put it in.
So he showed her how to sort first in five major piles—A, B, C, D in one pile and so on. And then to sort each pile again into five piles, one for each letter—and finally to sort each individual pile alphabetically.
It sounded like more handling. And perhaps it was. But the job of classification was greatly simplified. There was no more hunting for the missing pile. The work proceeded quickly and accurately.
A rough illustration. He might have gone a step further and deputized part of the girl's task to a machine instead of to the primitive system described. That is to say, he might have seen that she was provided with one of the preliminary filing baskets which file clerks often use. Then the task of sorting alphabetically could have been done in a single handling of each report.