206 REPORT OF THE FORESTRY COMMITTEE 



THE APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT TO LUMBERING 



OPERATIONS 



CBERMEN in common with those engaged in the other large industries of 

 the country have been interested, at least to some extent, in the discus- 

 sions regarding scientific management which have occupied a prominent 

 place in the public mind during the last few years. 



The most successful application of the general principles as laid down by 

 Taylor, Gannt, Emerson, and other exponents of this idea have been in industrial 

 plants, such as railroad shops, steel mills, shoe factories, and like institutions, 

 where the workmen are housed in buildings and therefore not exposed to the ele- 

 ments and where an individual is called upon to perform given routine work 

 many times during the day. The work is usually specialized, sometimes to a 

 high degree, and of such character that it lends itself more or less readily to 

 systematic methods. 



While some attempts have been made to inaugurate systems of so-called 

 scientific management, based on time studies and similar lines of investigation in 

 woods operations and in lumber manufacturing plants, there is no evidence that, 

 as a whole, the systems patterned after those in vogue in railroad shops and like 

 plants have proven successful. The reasons this is true are several, among which 

 the following are worth mentioning: The studies and recommendations have 

 come, to a large extent, from investigators unfamiliar with logging and lumber 

 manufacture, who have not understood the fine points in regard to forest and 

 mill labor which must be considered and who also have not been well informed on 

 the details of logging and manufacturing work. Their recommendations there- 

 fore have been of an experimental nature and, so far as learned, have seldom 

 proved as acceptable as the practice originally employed by the operator. There are 

 cases where individual parts of the operation have been improved, but these have 

 been chiefly concerned with the sales end of the business, or the systematizing of 

 labor employment and similar features, which bear a fairly close relation to sim- 

 ilar problems in many other industries. A further reason why the application of 

 present methods does not seem feasible to woods work is the fact that every tree 

 presents a new problem to the logger, because of the variation in size, the loca- 

 tion of the tree with reference to topography, transportation, manufacturing 

 plant, etc. 



Since the labor is rather unstable and it is often necessary to shift men re- 

 peatedly from one operation to another, the lumber industry can not be compared 

 to the average industrial plant, where the work is performed for long periods un- 

 der similar conditions. The placing of felling, skidding, hauling, and railroading 

 timber on a piecework basis or the establishment of a standard day's work is 

 difficult because of the many and constantly varying factors which enter into each. 



The most satisfactory results in increasing the efficiency of the various parts 

 of lumber operations have come from suggestions made by men who are now ac- 

 tively engaged in logging and manufacturing work, and in most cases the im- 

 proved methods have been applied to individual parts rather than to the entire 

 operation. 



