Our force will be divided into two parts, each under an assistant superintendent. Each battalion is composed of a number of companies, commanded by captains. Our two groups are divided into certain analogous departments each in charge of a foreman. Our arrangement will be for the first assistant superintendent to have charge of the drawing room, pattern shop, tool room, experimental room, stock room, power house, iron foundry, forge shop, carpenter shop, paint shop, shipping room, and the yard gang.

The second assistant superintendent will have under his charge all of the strictly machine shop departments, consisting of the planing department, heavy turning department, drilling and boring department, milling and gearcutting department, small parts department, grinding department, polishing department, finished parts storeroom, small parts assembling department, erecting department, and inspecting department.

This, then, is the skeleton of the plan of our organization and from this we may make up what is called, in army parlance, the roster. This will include all responsible officials, commencing with the superintendent and the office force, then the assistant superintendents, foremen, etc. A little further on we will add others more intimately connected with the workmen.

This plan requires the superintendent to look after his office force as to accounting, purchasing, issuing, time keeping, pay roll, manufacturing costs, and the correspondence, and to hold the two assistant superintendents responsible for all of the requirements of their respective jurisdictions. In a plant of the capacity which we have been considering and the force employed this will be all that one man can be expected to do.

In the same manner the two assistants will find their time quite steadily employed in the successful management of the eleven or twelve departments in their charge. The assistant superintendents should be men of good executive ability, good machinists, and understand in detail the operations of machining and working every variety of work or material handled under their supervision. They should understand drawings thoroughly and be able to make any of the calculations usually made in the drawing room. They should understand the character of the men under their control and the characteristics of machinists or other tradesmen working under them.

While these men are officials capable of handling men by direct contact with them, their positions now place them one step beyond that, and all matters of instruction as to the work, the everyday routine in passing work from one department to another, the discipline of the force under their charge, should be done with the foremen, and never with the men.

An infallible rule for injuring the efficiency of a shop official of whatever rank is for some higher authority to ignore him and pass orders on to the grade below him, or, in shop parlance, to "make a bridge of his nose." The

foremen, in turn, give the work to the gang boss having charge of similar work, and he instructs the workmen when necessary and sees that the work is pushed along. This may seem a little like "red tape," but it is at once the quickest, surest, and safest way to manage the shop, and one that will produce the greatest amount of good work with the least friction and ill-feeling on the part of the employees. Still, any official witnessing a violation of the sanitary or of what may be called the police regulations of the establishment is expected to call the offender to account and later to report him to his foreman.

The foreman should be a man of excellent mechanical ability, understand drawings thoroughly, and be able to make any of the ordinary calculations necessary. He should be able to make estimates as to time, cost, and material, of anything handled in his department. He should know the characteristics of men in general and the abilities and dispositions of those under his control. If his room is large enough to have gang bosses he should give his orders to them, and not to individual workmen. He should know every item of work passing through his room, keep things moving in it, and see that work transferred to him from another department is in proper condition and is promptly used, and that the product of his department going to another one is in proper condition for the transfer and is passed on without unnecessary delay.

It is not at all necessary that the foreman of a small department, or over a few men, should devote all or even a large percentage of his time to strictly foreman's duties, as he may be able to do considerable work himself while directing others. The point is, to have one competent man in charge of the force, the gang, the room, or the department, whom we can hold responsible for the results in that department. In the same way some departments may be large enough to require gang bosses, or assistant foremen.

The gang bosses or foremen of small departments may do some machine work themselves, but it frequently happens that it pays better when they do not, but on the contrary give their entire time and energy to keeping things moving; to seeing that the operatives at the machines are supplied with proper tools and materials, that their product is promptly moved out of their way when completed, and that everything moves harmoniously, with proper speeds and feeds on all the machines. The gang boss may thus make himself a very useful man.

There is another view of the question. The gang boss is very likely to be more in the position of "one of the gang" than the foreman, more closely affiliated with the workmen of his gang than a foreman is ever likely to become, and the men will naturally feel more interest in their work under his direct leadership because of this.

In our analogy of the plan of organizing and administering the affairs of a manufacturing plant to the military organization, we had got to the foreman

as corresponding to the captain. Our gang bosses will fittingly represent the non-commissioned officers. These are privates of more than ordinary ability and faithfulness and have been promoted for these reasons. They are the real leaders as well as instructors of the privates and form what might be termed the connecting link between them, as a class, and the commissioned officers. So should the gang boss or assistant foreman be, and his influence for good in the smooth running and harmonious, as well as efficient and profitable, conduct of the shop is a very important matter which should receive the most careful consideration in the organization and operation of the plant.

The gang boss should be a man properly qualified for the position; able to read drawings readily; to know enough of human nature to "size up" the abilities of the men under him, and to know, not only each man's practical knowledge of the business, but his natural disposition, so as to be able to direct him intelligently and for the best good of the establishment. In the foregoing remarks as to foremen, etc., those of the machine shop proper have been meant. But in a general way the principles are equally applicable to those of other departments.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE SUPERINTENDENT'S OFFICE

Avoiding complexity of books, forms, etc. Arrangement of the superintendent's office. Progress of orders board. Its description and use. Handling correspondence. Superintendent's orders. Assistant superintendent's orders, or shop orders. Foreman's orders. The regular routine. Orders from the general manager. The usual practice in making out orders. Routine of orders. List of parts. List of gray iron castings. List of forgings. List of purchased parts and stock. Requisition for gray iron castings. Requisition for forgings. Requisition for materials. Requisition for purchased parts. Material and cost card. Time account. Accounting for labor. Time registering clocks. "Day time." "Job time." Distribution of time. Accounting for jobs continued and jobs completed. Checking the time account. Defective material and spoiled work. Special requisition necessary. Consumable stock, materials, tools, and supplies. The supply requisition. Fuel account. Few special books required. The "loose leaf" system.

IN continuing the subject of machine shop management the endeavor will be to avoid as much as possible the modern tendency toward multiplication of account books, blanks, cards, and the like. In practice we are liable to burden ourselves with such a complexity of these things as finally to build up a system costing more for maintenance than it is worth, and what is of vastly more consequence, producing results that are far from showing a correct statement of the conditions. The author has in mind a recent instance of a shop containing less than seventy employees, while the office, stock, and shipping rooms contained over twenty employees operating an elaborate system, by which a small steel part produced by less than four hours' labor was billed at eleven dollars and a job of nearly three hundred dollars earned a profit of less than fifteen dollars, according to the showing of the so-called system of cost keeping. It is such failures that throw discredit upon Cost Systems. It is true that any system of benefit must cost something, and it is equally true that any one system will not be suitable for all cases, but must be modified to suit conditions.

The offices are so arranged that the superintendent has a public and a private office. In the public office will be a large table convenient for spreading out drawings, and desks for the superintendent, the two assistant superintendents, and the chief inspector, as well as the usual filing cases, cases for

technical publications, catalogues, etc. In the large, open room of the office building is ample space and desk room for the purchasing clerk, cost clerk, and two bookkeepers or assistants should their services be necessary, and a special enclosure for the time clerk, with a convenient pay window opening into the entrance passageway.

At the left are formed pockets These are used Over the squares

On the wall of the superintendent's public office is fixed a board, which, by the introducing and changing of small plugs, may represent in a graphic manner the progress of the work in the shops. This board is 37 inches wide and 27 inches high, and aside from the headings, etc., is ruled in 1-inch squares by white lines on the black surface of the board. The design is shown in Fig. 163. In the center of each square is a 3-inch hole. lettered the headings similar to those given. At the right are in which may be placed small cards giving the months. where orders run from one month into another and so on. are figures for days of the month. Fitted to the holes is a series of wood or metal plugs, upon the 3-inch circular face of which may be gummed discs of white paper bearing the numbers of the orders in the works. These plugs are moved daily from one hole to another as the work advances. Should it be desirable to leave a continuous record of the day of the month on which an order arrived at each stage of progress, or passed through a certain department, there should be four or more columns of holes for each day of the month, and a sufficient number of plugs with the order number indicated upon them to leave in the several holes as the work advances.

The board shown is intended for regular orders for lots of machines or of assembled portions of them carried along together. A similar board may be used for tracing the progress of job or experimental orders. It will be the duty of the cost clerk to make regular daily rounds of the shops, preferably early in the forenoon, and note down in a small book carried for that purpose the facts necessary to make the changes on the board, and on his return to the office to change the plugs to represent the progress of the work. The author saw this plan used in a plant that included a number of buildings, some of them at quite a distance from the superintendent's office, and realized what a saving of time and annoyance it was and how many necessary questions it answered during the day.

The correspondence of the superintendent's office will usually be of a limited nature and relate chiefly to quotations and purchase of materials. Letters of the purchasing clerk will be signed by the superintendent. All correspondence with the general office will be by the superintendent, although he may refer such parts as he desires to heads of departments, through the assistant superintendent having charge of them.

Matters in reference to work done in and about the plant by outside