Scientific management is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply the science of engineering processes to management. Scientific Management is also known as Taylorism after its pioneer, Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Taylor began the theory’s development in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s within manufacturing industries, especially steel. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s. Although Taylor died in 1915, by the 1920s scientific management was still influential but had entered into competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas.

The Midvale Steel Company, “one of America’s great armor plate making plants,” was the birthplace of scientific management. In 1877, Frederick W. Taylor started as a clerk in Midvale but advanced to foreman in 1880. As foreman, Taylor was constantly impressed by the failure of team members to produce more than about one-third of what he deemed a good day’s work. Taylor determined to discover, by scientific methods, how long it should take men to perform each given piece of work; and it was in the fall of 1882 that he started to put the first features of scientific management into operation.

Although scientific management as a distinct theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important parts of industrial engineering and management today.