BUSINESS EFFICIENCY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22101, 3 November 1933, Page 6

BUSINESS EFFICIENCY

EXHIBITION IN LONDON THE DAY OF THE MACHINE. . (Fbom Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, September 29. Many remarkable appliances are to be seen at the Business Efficiency Exhibition now in progress at the White City.. Some of the machines on view will do in ah hour work which formerly has taken several days. Others will do the tasks hitherto reserved for the most intelligent employees—and without making the mistakes to which even the most efficient are sometimes liable. There is a machine which, with the aid of a single assistant, will frank, postmark, and seal between 12,000 and 15,000 letters an hour, automatically keeping, count of the money its-'owner hag prepaid at the Post Office and stopping work when this sum is exhausted. Recently two of these machines, working in co-operation, got through a million envelopes a fortnight. There are the calculating and adding machines, which will do anything with figures except make a mistake. Tips year there is a new model about the size of a typewriter, suitable for the smallest shopkeeper. Doors will be endowed , not only with ears, but with eyes and notebooks. A lock, recently invented,. will:—■ 1. Record in print the time the door is locked and unlocked, and by whom. 2. Prevent the locking of the main door until every other door or window is securely fastened; ! and 3. Reveal, if anyone returns to the office after hours, who it was, and how long the visit lasted.

Lord Melchett, who opened the exhibition, said that those who took part in any industrial enterprise of any importance knew very well that if they were less efficient their costs would be higher, their outputs lower, and they would suffer in competition with rivals. With the world moving to larger units, the larger outputs and quantities required the fullest use of mechanical office assistance, and the latest, improvements that intensive thought could provide were absolutely, essential to control the larger units. ■ . . Lord Melchett replied to the critics of Government interference. He wag a great believer in work being done by the people who - understood it, he said, and would like to see business men get together and manage their own affairs successfully and usefully without Government interference, but at present the business man did not get on with the job. He had begun to wonder whether the industrialists of this country would ever realise their responsibilities, and either set their house in order or cease to grumble when the Government tried to do it for them. When he saw ho.w Mr Walter Elliot had brought together the scattered farming community of this country, he sometimes wondered whether it would not be a good plan, to turn him on to some of the other industries of Great Britain that were in need of modernisation. — (Cheers.) Sir Charles Higham said he could see no reason why offices should work more than seven or even six hours a day-—and not at all on Saturdays. He did not agree with Sir Herbert Austin’s contention that it would be better for industry if women were sent out of business and back to their homes. "Women are equally as efficient as men, and they are certainly more loyal,” he said. “They have only two objects in life; one is to do their job well, and the other to think about whom they shall marry.”