Part of the story of the migration of Frederick W. Taylor's ideas from industry into retailing can be traced back to a pioneer in the field of electronic data processing, Herman Hollerith (1860-1929), sometimes called the first "statistical engineer." In his biography Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (1872), Geoffrey D. Austrian maintains that "While Taylor's famous time and motion studies started with the individual worker, and Hollerith's attention focused on efficient use of the machine, their interests came firmly together on the common ground of statistics. [Indeed] Taylor's methods could not be proved without accurate and timely cost accounting" (p. 202). (INTRO NOTE Taylorism)
In the early years of the century, Hollerith, the inventor of the electric tabulating machine and punched cards that came to be used in industrial accounting, hired out his services to Chicago merchant Marshall Field, who was about to turn a small dry goods firm into the largest department store in the world. Determined to find out what women consumers, to whom he had begun to advertise directly, wanted, and faced by the growing assortment of goods, Field asked Hollerith to undertake a systematic sales analysis. (INTRO NOTE Retailing) Punch cards were able to tell what articles had been sold in a given month, by class and item number and value, by date, location, customer, and whether for credit or cash. A profile of the business picture, then, could be achieved simply by grouping the cards according to any single organizing principle or combination of principles; comparative figures could be obtained by passing the cards one or more times through the machines.
In 1911, Hollerith sold his business to a small company that, headed by Thomas J. Watson, eventually became IBM.