II. Job Engineering

Frederick W. Taylor established the basis for modern industrial engineering late in the nineteenth century. Job engineering focuses on the tasks to be performed, methods to be used, workflows among employees, layout of the workplace, performance standards, and interdependencies between people and machines. Job design factors are to be examined by means of time-and-motion studies, determining the time required to do each task and the movements needed to perform it efficiently.

A keystone of job engineering is specialisation of labor with the goal of achieving greater efficiency. 

High levels of specialisation are intended to :

�Allow employees to learn a task rapidly;

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Permit short work cycles so that performance can be almost automatic and involve little or no mental effort;

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Make hiring easier because low-skilled people can be easily trained and paid relatively low wages; and

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Reduce the need for supervision, owing to simplified jobs and standardization.

Advantages:

�It is an imperative job design approach because the resulting cost savings can be measured immediately and easily.

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It is concerned with appropriate levels of automation, that is, looking for ways to replace workers with machines to perform the most physically demanding and repetitive tasks.

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The job engineering approach often continues to be successfully used, especially when it is combined with a concern for the social context in which the jobs are performed.