The work processes of most offices are readily recognizable, in industrial terms, as continuous flow processes. In the main they consist of the flow of documents required to effect and record commercial transactions, contractual arrangements, etc. While the processes are punctuated by personal interviews and correspondence, these serve merely to facilitate the flow of documentation. We may take as our example the most common form of transaction, the sale of commodities; it will be understood that everything that takes place in this process has as its mirror image a corresponding process on the part of the firms on the other side, with the signs reversed.
The customer order is the cell of the process. It moves through a stream of records and calculations which begin with its appearance in the salesman's order book, or in the mail, or over the telephone, until it reaches its final resting place as an infinitesimal portion of the corporation's statement of financial condition. The order must be opened and examined. The customer must be clearly identified as to firm name, address for billing, separate address, if any, for shipping, and, most important, credit standing. (If the order comes with payment already attached, it becomes part of a tributary which subsequently rejoins the main stream.) The items ordered must be clearly and properly interpreted as to type and quantity. The correct discount must be chosen for each order in accordance with corporate sales policy, which is more or less complex and is stratified according to quantities ordered, type of customer, special arrangements, etc. An invoice or bill must be prepared listing the merchandise for shipment and extending quantities by unit price; this invoice must be totaled, discounted, and supplementary charges such as shipping or tax added. Now the invoice moves on to another stage: On the one side, some of its copies provide shipping documents for the shipping division and packing slips for the customer. On the other side, further copies provide the raw materials of the accounting procedure. In the latter process, the invoice totals are posted to accounts for sales on the one side and the customer's account (or cash) on the other. Customer accounts are further posted, in controlled batch totals, to an overall accounts-receivable account. At the same time, tabulations must be made from the invoice to record the depletion of inventory, to keep sales records on each stock item, as well as sales records by salesman and territory for the calculation of sales commission due, for charting sales trends, etc. Finally, the summaries of these various accounts, tested for internal consistency and balance with each other, form the raw materials for the monthly summary accounts and the statements of financial condition of the division or corporation.
In traditional form, this entire process was the province of the bookkeeper, with the assistance of other clerical help such as the order biller, junior clerk for posting, etc. But as soon as the flow of work becomes large enough, and the methods of office management are applied, the process is subdivided into minute operations. Characteristically, separate clerks open the mail, date and route the orders, interpret customer information, clear credit, check the items ordered for clarity and to see if they are in inventory, type an invoice, add prices to it, extend, discount, calculate shipping charges, post to the customer account, etc., etc. just as in manufacturing processes—in fact, even more easily than in manufacturing processes—the work of the office is analyzed and parcelled out among a great many detail workers, who now lose all comprehension of the process as a whole and the policies which underlie it. The special privilege of the clerk of old, that of being witness to the operation of the enterprise as a whole and gaining a view of its progress toward its ends and its condition at any given moment, disappears. Each of the activities requiring interpretation of policy or contact beyond the department or section becomes the province of a higher functionary.
Needless to say, this conception is all the more readily applicable to those transactions which reflect no movement of physical commodities, such as banking and other financial transactions, the payment of insurance premiums and claims, and so on. But even those processes which, in an outsider's view, would appear to be difficult to subdivide in this way become, with sufficient volume, susceptible to the same treatment. Correspondence, for example, may be sorted into a variety of standard inquiries and problems and then answered with preformulated responseseither duplicated by machine or repetitiously typed (nowadays on automatic, tape-controlled typewriters). That smaller portion which requires individual treatment can be set aside for the attention of a higher grade of correspondence clerk while all the rest is classified, batched, and counted. On the basis of batch totals, the higher echelons of the office will then be able to see the type of inquiry or error which has caused the correspondence and use this as a check against other departments, or weigh these figures against past experience and against the experience of the trade as a whole. At the same time, the batch totals can be correlated with the time taken for dealing with correspondence of a particular sort, so that the expenditure of labor time may be kept under constant scrutiny and control.
In general, the rationalization of most office work and the replacement of the all-around clerical worker by the subdivided detail worker proceeds easily because of the nature of the process itself. In the first place, clerical operations are conducted almost entirely on paper, and paper is far easier than industrial products to rearrange, move from station to station, combine and recombine according to the needs of the process, etc. Second and more important, much of the “raw material" of clerical work is numerical in form, and so the process may itself be structured according to the rules of mathematics, an advantage which the managers of physical production processes often strive after but can seldom achieve. As flows subject to mathematical rules, clerical processes can be checked at various points by mathematical controls. Thus, contrary to the past opinion of many that office work was unlike factory work in that its complexities rendered it more difficult to rationalize, it proved easier to do so once the volume of work grew large enough and once a search for methods of rationalization was seriously undertaken.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Clerical Workers
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