Scientific management, also called Taylorism,[1] was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows.

Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s; by the 1920s, it was still influential but had begun an era of competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas. 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. These include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or merely to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation. Scientific management's application was contingent on a high level of managerial control over employee work practices. This necessitated a higher ratio of managerial workers to laborers than previous management methods. The great difficulty in accurately differentiating any such intelligent, detail-oriented management from mere misguided micromanagement also caused interpersonal friction between workers and managers, and social tensions between the bluecollar and white-collar classes. Scientific management is a variation on the theme of economic efficiency; it is a late 19th and early 20th century instance of the larger recurring theme in human life of increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas of what matters. Thus it is a chapter in a larger narrative that includes many ideas and fields, from the folk wisdom of thrift to a profusion of applied-science successors, including time and motion study, the Efficiency Movement (which was the broader cultural echo of scientific management's impact on business managers specifically), Fordism, operations management, operations research, industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, logistics, business process management, business process reengineering, lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma. There is a fluid continuum linking scientific management by that name with the later fields, and there is often no mutual exclusiveness when discussing the details of any one of these topics. According to Henry Ford, the assembly line was based on three simple principles: "the planned, orderly, and continuous progression of the commodity through the shop; the delivery of work instead of leaving it to the workman's initiative to find it; an analysis of operations into their constituent parts." A scientific approach to these principles, the next logical step in the organization of work, had already been enunciated by the American industrial engineer Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915). From his work an entirely new discipline--industrial engineering or scientific management--emerged, in which the managerial functions of planning and coordination were elevated to a primary position in the productive process.