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'Henry Laurence Gantt, A.B., M.E.' (1861-23 November 1919) was a mechanical engineer and management consultant who is most famous for developing the Gantt chart in the 1910s. These Gantt charts were employed on major infrastructure projects including the Hoover Dam and Interstate highway system and still are an important tool in project management.^[1]

Contents

Biography

Gantt charts

Contributions

References

See also

Biography

Gantt was born in Calvert County, Maryland, USA. He graduated from McDonogh School in 1878 and Johns Hopkins College and worked as a teacher and draughtsman before becoming a mechanical engineer. In 1887 he joined Frederick W. Taylor in the scientific management of Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel and worked with him there until 1893. In his later career as a management consultant, in addition to the Gantt chart, he also designed the 'task and bonus' system of wage payment and developed methods of measuring worker efficiency and productivity.

Gantt charts

The following discussion of Gantt charts originally appeared in Herrmann (2005):^[2]
It is important to note that Gantt created many different types of charts. Moreover, Gantt designed his charts so that foremen or other supervisors could quickly know whether production was on schedule, ahead of schedule, or behind schedule. Modern project management software includes this critical function even now.
Gantt (1903)^[3] describes two types of ''balances'': the “man’s record,” which shows what each worker should do and did do, and the 'daily balance of work', which shows the amount of work to be done and the amount that is done. Gantt gives an example with orders that will require many days to complete. The daily balance has rows for each day and columns for each part or each operation. At the top of each column is the amount needed. The amount entered in the appropriate cell is the number of parts done each day and the cumulative total for that part. Heavy horizontal lines indicate the starting date and the date that the order should be done. According to Gantt, the graphical daily balance is “a method of scheduling and recording work.” In this article, Gantt also describes the use of 'production cards' for assigning work to each operator and recording how much was done each day.
In ''Work, Wages, and Profits'' (originally published in 1916),^[4] Gantt explicitly discusses scheduling, especially in the job shop environment. He proposes giving to the foreman each day an “order of work” that is an ordered list of jobs to be done that day. Moreover, he discusses the need to coordinate activities to avoid “interferences.” However, he also warns that the most elegant schedules created by planning offices are useless if they are ignored, a situation that he observed.
In ''Organizing for Work'' (originally published in 1919),^[5] Gantt gives two principles for his charts: one, measure activities by the amount of 'time' needed to complete them; two, the space on the chart can be used the represent the 'amount of the activity' that should have been done in that time. Gantt shows a progress chart that indicates for each month of the year, using a thin horizontal line, the number of items produced during that month. In addition, a thick horizontal line indicates the number of items produced during the year. Each row in the chart corresponds to an order for parts from a specific contractor, and each row indicates the starting month and ending month of the deliveries. It is the closest thing to the Gantt charts typically used today in scheduling systems, though it is at a higher level than machine scheduling.
Gantt’s machine record chart and man record chart are quite similar, though they show both the actual working time for each day and the cumulative working time for a week. Each row of the chart corresponds to an individual machine or operator. These charts do not indicate which tasks were to be done, however.

Contributions

Henry Gantt's legacy to production management is the following:

★ The Gantt chart: Still accepted as an important management tool today, it provides a graphic schedule for the planning and controlling of work, and recording progress towards stages of a project. The chart has a modern variation, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).

★ Industrial Efficiency: Industrial efficiency can only be produced by the application of scientific analysis to all aspects of the work in progress. The industrial management role is to improve the system by eliminating chance and accidents.

★ The Task And Bonus System: He linked the bonus paid to managers to how well they taught their employees to improve performance.

★ The social responsibility of business: He believed that businesses have obligations to the welfare of society that they operate in.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) awards an annual medal in honor of Henry Laurence Gantt.^[6]

References

1. Gantt chart history Accessed 7 April 2007.
2. Herrmann, Jeffrey W., ''History of Decision-Making Tools for Production Scheduling,'' Proceedings of the 2005 Multidisciplinary Conference on Scheduling: Theory and Applications, New York, July 18-21, 2005.
3. Gantt, Henry L., A graphical daily balance in manufacture, Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Volume XXIV, pages 1322-1336, 1903.
4. Gantt, Henry L., ''Work, Wages, and Profits,'' second edition, Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1916. Reprinted by Hive Publishing Company, Easton, Maryland, 1973.
5. Gantt, Henry L., ''Organizing for Work,'' Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, New York, 1919. Reprinted by Hive Publishing Company, Easton, Maryland, 1973.
6. ASME Henry Laurence Gantt Medal Accessed 7 April 2007.

See also

★ Henry Laurence Gantt Medal

★ Scheduling

★ Human factors