SUBCONTRACTING: Stanley Plan

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WPB men who think that subcontracting will win the war were talking last week about an ingenious new mechanical scheme to increase subcontracting. Its author is a fast-talking, high-domed, ex-filling station owner from Richmond, Va. named James S. Stanley, who has a passion for punch cards and Hollerith sorting machines. He was last heard of eight years ago as the founder of the Leisure League of America, to which he contributed suggestions for 700 ways to kill time. But his own hobby has always been work.

Jim Stanley's idea grew out of a subcontractor hunt he conducted for Floyd Odium's Contract Distribution Office last summer. The big gap between sub-and prime contractors, he found, was ignorance. The small manufacturer could not find out just what the big one wanted, or even who he was; the big fellow could not find out what the small fry had to offer. In his talks with the small fry, Stanley decided that they needed to know only a few basic facts to find their proper subcontracting niche: 1) the materials to be handled, 2) the type of machines required, 3) the number of machine-hours per job, 4) the operation expected of the machine, 5) the weight of the part to be machined. If there were an alphabetical code to express these facts, any man with a machine could look up its war uses like a number in the phone book.

With the help of the Army & Navy Munitions Board, Stanley coded every kind of U.S. defense machine (about 4,000). There were just enough letters in the alphabet to fit 26 classes of machine, from A for boring to Z for miscellaneous. More specific descriptions (size, type, etc.) were assigned letters too. DAB, for example, means D for milling machine, A for knee-type, horizontal, universal, B for No. 2 light-type-all of which is plain English to the man who owns one. The other four basic facts are similarly keyed with numerals and other letters.

Once the code is set up, a prime contractor translates into it the parts of his job he wants help on. The U.S. Census Bureau's Hollerith machines take this alphabet soup and turn it into a directory. Thumbing this directory to see where his machines belong, a would-be subcontractor can then write the prime contractor (whose name is also coded) for detailed plans, make a firm bid for the work.

Stanley's first guinea-pig prime contractor was Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. The first "Directory of Contract Opportunities" was ready in December. It contained 132 coded jobs to be done, and soothing instructions on how to use it ("Don't take one look at this directory and then decide it is too complicated. . . . Anyone who can read a telephone book can read this"). Jim Stanley and Westinghouse Production Engineer S. W. ("Bill") Schmidt went to Indianapolis, where a pool of 15 local factories and shops had agreed to try the plan in a small way. Bill Schmidt was a cagey tester, did not show his detailed drawing until he was sure that the local factories had doped out the directory properly on their own hook. But in ten days he had signed ten contracts.