The brass mill is used to work for had an industrial engineering department of 14 during the 70's.  By the time I started working there the staff had gone down to 5.  The reasons for the reductions were computers.  The tracking of work, calculations of rates, and determinations of bonuses was so much quicker easier and automated with our improved computer systems that we simply didn't have the work for more people.  As far as if it is a good or bad thing.  I leave that for you to decide.

Back before the cemetery got it's first backhoe in 1988 graves had to be dug by hand.  It generally took 2-3 days (including breaks and lunch) using 3 workers plus most of a day to backfill.  Using hydraulic technology it takes 1 person on average 3 hours to dig and 1 hour to backfill increasing productivity by 2,400% (72 manhours vs 4 manhours).  This frees up the 2 extra workers to complete other tasks.  Cemetery work is never done (in the summer anyway).

Back in the day and used still today all cemetery records were kept on hard copy in ledgers and on maps.  Often this information is entered by several generations of caretakers and in different ways.  This can become a nightmare when you are dealing with old lots where the family thinks they have a free space but are not sure.  The records can be so fractured that we are just not sure if the space is used since there are people that were buried and never got a marker.  We have begun using a piece of software called the cryptkeeper which has a mapping program giving information at a glance including grave section and lot # as well as being color coded to say if the space is unusable, unsold, sold, or occupied.  This can greatly speed up operations such as just knowing how many sellable spaces are left.  In addition each space has an information page which contains information ranging from the deceased dates and family info to which undertaker buried them to a spot where you can see a digital picture of the headstone on the lot.  This program alone can save hundreds of hours per year of tedius searching through 100 year old ledgers.  Of course to use it requires many hundreds of man hours transferring thousands of graves of information and taking the digital pictures of the headstones.  We are still in the process of converting our records.


Take it for what you will.

Yes you can use it.

Using the examples above, some may say it's detrimental because the introduction of technology has cost jobs. However, I see it as a reallocation of labor. In Rathe's example, the 9 positions that are no longer needed are filling other needs somewhere else, thereby increasing overall (on a national GPD level) production and efficiency. Technology has not caused job loss, it's just shifted it and promoted a culture/need for workers with higher skill sets.

Do you remember back in the day (I'm a child of the 80's, so that's what I mean) if you wanted to order something from a catalog, it would often say 10-12 weeks for delivery and that's what was expected. Then as computerization started to take hold, it became 6-8 weeks, 3-4 weeks, and now if we can't have it in 2 days or less it seems like we're waiting forever. This is just another example of increased efficiency promoted by technology.