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Businesses may exist to manage products or provide services, yet sometimes the management structure of even the best companies can run amok. Unwatched, it can grow in ways that has little to do with the company's original mission even sabotaging growth efforts.
Enter Science Management Corp., a leading international professional services firm that addresses pressing management issues for its client companies -- issues such as organization, productivity and quality.
For the past 40 years, Science Management Corp. has been working with corporate captains to keep their management staff afloat and shipshape. The company was founded in 1946 as a partnership formed by Joseph H. Quick, James H. Duncan and William G. O'Brien. They called themselves The Work-Factor Co.
The company's original product was the Work-Factor System, a system of labor measurement and control that evolved from the Elemental Time Standards for measuring manual and mental work first used by Quick.
During those early years, the partners' main job was limited to teaching and implementing the Work-Factor System which companies generally used to measure the productivity of their assembly line operations.
However as the company matured, it diversified, developing and implementing other industrial engineering and management services systems that had broader applications to business, industry and government. By 1962, the name Work-Factor Co., was uncomfortably limiting and a new name was selected -- the Wofac Corp., a contraction of the Work Factor name.
As the company continued to grow, offer new products --including the VeFAC programming system that could measure and control indirect labor costs, expand internationally, and in order to go public, the quest began for another name -- a name that would reflect the nature of the array of consulting services offered. In 1968, they unveiled their new moniker -- Science Management Corp. (SMC), and 10 months later made a public stock offering.
SMC wasn't limiting itself to pioneering new applications to business problems. In 1969, it acquired Decision Studies Group, which later became SMC Management Technology.
A year later, the consulting civil engineer company, A. W. Martin Associates Inc., was acquired.
In 1972/73, the company embarked on a strategic orientation program of "one stop shopping" for quality services. In 1973, the executive recruitment firm -- Handy Associates -- was acquired. Handy Associates...