Êtes-vous un étudiant de l'EPFL à la recherche d'un projet de semestre?
Travaillez avec nous sur des projets en science des données et en visualisation, et déployez votre projet sous forme d'application sur GraphSearch.
Concept
Soho Foundry
Résumé
Soho Foundry is a factory created in 1775 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt and their sons Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt Jr. at Smethwick, West Midlands, England (), for the manufacture of steam engines. Now owned by Avery Weigh-Tronix, it is used for the manufacture of weighing machines.
The early history of the Soho Foundry is of pivotal importance both to the history of the industrial revolution and to the study of the development of management theory. The Soho Foundry stood out from other factories of the day in the sophistication of its planning, its production processes and its management techniques; practising concepts that would not become commonplace until a century later. Comparing its workings to the techniques of mass production and scientific management made famous by Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor in the United States in the early 20th century, the economist Eric Roll wrote "Neither Taylor, Ford nor any other modern experts devised anything in the way of plan that cannot be discovered at Soho before 1805".
The factory was built on the edge of the Birmingham Canal on land bought in 1795. The following year the foundry was open.
The Soho Foundry was planned with a degree of sophistication unprecedented for a factory of its time. Its products were produced out of standardised interchangeable parts, reducing the need to supervise work as it was executed, simplifying stock control and enabling more efficient repair of faults for customers. Production processes were broken down into small tasks, enabling an extremely high degree of specialisation among workers – one document from 1801, for example, describes how a team of four specific workers was "to be constantly employed in fitting nozzles". These tasks took place in a series of workshops spatially located along the flow of production, minimising the expense and time-wastage of the movement of materials through the works.
Source officielle
À propos de ce résultat
Cette page est générée automatiquement et peut contenir des informations qui ne sont pas correctes, complètes, à jour ou pertinentes par rapport à votre recherche. Il en va de même pour toutes les autres pages de ce site. Veillez à vérifier les informations auprès des sources officielles de l'EPFL.