Scale, Scope or Division of Labour: Coping with Volume, Variety and Variability in Manufacturing

Abstract

We are all familiar with Adam Smith’s description in “The Wealth of Nations” of the organization of the manufacture of pins based on the principle of the division of labour. Ever since, conventional wisdom has held up the desirability of using this principle of dividing up the work required in manufacture into a number of steps performed in series. It is only when demand is insufficient to keep more than one person busy that division of labour would not be used. Yet, when one looks at current developments in manufacturing, it is surprising the extent to which there is a general trend away from the organization of manufacture around simple series flow with considerable division of labour. Nor does there seem to be much of a place for the individual craftsman, capable of making a very wide variety of products, with whom Adam Smith contrasted the, to him new, form of organization around coordinated series flow. Rather there seems to be several, perhaps converging, trends in manufacturing organization. One is the development of cooperatives of crafts people who share accounting and marketing services and who agree amongst themselves about how work should be shared. This form of organization seems to be most developed in Northern Italy but it can be found wherever adequate communication facilities for both information and goods exist and perhaps also where relatively inexpensive computer controlled manufacturing equipment can be used. Another trend evident in the Eurpean and North American automobile industry is the abandonment of the use of the traditional moving belt assembly line, with its rigid work pacing and tight linking of work tasks, for those manufacturing operations that still require people to perform the production tasks (see Buzacott 1990).