**1. Introduction**

The discipline we now call industrial engineering (IE) originated in the US with the practices of Frederick W. Taylor at the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s as he progressed from machinist, to time clerk, to machine shop foreman, ultimately becoming chief engineer upon receiving a mechanical engineering degree in 1883. His participation in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) provided him with the opportunity to present his shop management practices which were referred to as "work measurement" when applied to a specific work task (manual labor such as shoveling; skilled labor such as lathe operation). Broader applications to groups of workers in a plant or service organization (educational organizations, government agencies, the ASME) became known world-wide as Scientific Management [1], especially after Taylor testified before the US Interstate Commerce Commission in 1911.

Henry L. Gantt was recruited to perform work measurement at Midvale Steel under Taylor's guidance, and as a consultant one speed and feed problems in metal cutting at Bethlehem Steel. Gantt modified one of Taylor's published practices (piecerate system) to account for productivity factors outside the workers control. Gantt

became an independent consultant and ultimately lectured on IE at four US universities. Another early practitioner of IE was Morris L. Cooke, whom Taylor funded to work on efficiency and effectiveness of the ASME, the Carnegie Foundation, and the municipal government of Philadelphia. Frank B. Gilbreth originated the practice of work measurement in the construction trades, though he never attended college. His approach came to be known as time and motion study, which he first applied to bricklaying (a trade he learned as an apprentice). He insisted on division of labor between the brick mason (skilled labor) and the unskilled workers who "set up" the mason with bricks and fresh mortar; the specific location of the bricks and mortar relative to the mason, and even the consistency of the mortar, could be planned to make the mason as productive as possible. Furthermore, with appropriate design of the motions the mason should use, he demonstrated that the mason could increase the number of bricks laid in a given time by a factor of three. At age 27, Gilbreth founded (1895) a highly successful construction firm wherein all work was designed using time and motion study, but gave it up at age 44 to become a full-time management consultant. Frank's wife, Lillian M. Gilbreth, was a PhD psychologist who assisted Frank in the preparation of six books between 1908 and 1917 to disseminate what he had learned about the broad topic of performance measurement, starting with the worker and broadening to the work processes and the overall work system.

As Japan began to recover from destruction of its industrial base during WWII, and to transition from essentially an agrarian society to an economic powerhouse, their industrial/production engineers originated many practices now considered part of modern industrial engineering. Starting in the 1970s and intensifying in the 1980s, there was significant debate in the US and other advanced economies in the West concerning what was enabling the Japanese to capture larger and larger market share in technological products such as automobiles, televisions, and copy machines. There was a US IE professor, Richard J. Schonberger, who spend a significant amount of time in Japan and authored several books [2–4] detailing his interviews and observations from visiting top-performing Japanese manufacturing firms. In *Japanese Manufacturing Techniques* [2], he revealed the following nine "hidden lessons in simplicity":
