THE EFFECTS OF AUTOMATED OFFICE MACHINES ON SECRETARY’S OUTPUT (A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIA BREWERIES PLC ENUGU)

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1            BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

To improve efficiency in industry, management is usually looking for ways to increase productivity, quality of goods and services and grab the best edge among her other competitors. These aims can easily be achieved through the use of high technology in the office. The overall operations of a secretary’s naturally involve a tremendous amount of paper shuffling and record keeping, accounting procedures for payrolls, financial reports and invoices.

Office method and services are daily getting complex and the volume of material and information to be handled are daily increasing and reaction or expense and time expected of the secretary is now shorter than it has been in the recent past. There is therefore the need for office administrator, which include the secretary, to cope with the increasing quantity and quality of services required, as a result automated office machines are rapidly spreading in Nigeria industries.

Prior to the present information revolution called information age, most of the jobs performed by secretaries in office are manually carried out. Consequently upon this, most outputs and service were of very low standard, moreover, great deal of time; money, energy and material were lost in the course of production one unit of an output. Workload were enormous and the staffing, for the small as possible. The clerk a sort of combination photocopier, secretary and accountant had too much to do, and time of the work was laborious dull and time consuming. Imagine making twenty copies of a chapter of a book by hand.

More so, overall productivity and efficiency of the secretary and organization as a whole was very low standard. This was as a result of the limitation of human efforts such as fatigue, sickness and death.

During the 19th century industrial revolution of Europe and that of American many machines were produced which possesses the ability to perform most of the functions previously performed b man, not only that, the machines found to be capable of performing by man, they were found to be able to out – perform man quantitatively and qualitatively.

Following his discovery a lot of improvement and innovation have been introduced to enhance and facilitate the secretary’s jobs. Various machines have been developed and introduced into some of them are:

vReprographic machines

vComputer

vFacsimile machines

vTelephone

vTele printers

vScanning and collating machines

vElectronic typewriters

vThought tank machines

vTape call – maker

vIntercom (PABX) facilities

vInternet net work

During the industrial revolution, the secretary achieved a ‘cog’ status, in that she had to work with the machines in real sense. But with automated machines, secretary has been able to liberate herself from the status. Her duties are now defined:

vTo control the mechanism

vTo feed information and instructions into machines

The introduction of these automated office machines have so reduced the tediousness of work in the office and has made the secretary’s output to be relatively high.

          In some years age, some people were questionnaire whether secretaries will lose their jobs because of automated office machines? But this cannot happen because sectaries are trained in such away they are the life wire of an organization.

          Office communication could only take place by the use of come of the automated office machines as communication is the process of creating transmitting and interpreting ideas, facts, opinions and feelings. These new innovating brought a lot of changes to the secretary work in terms of memos, reports and the skill of communication, for instance giving instructions and interviewing.

1.2            STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

The problem of this study is to gain information about the effects of automated office machines on secretary’s output. In offices, secretaries are employed to perform secretarial functions exclusively.

          In most cases, these secretaries are deficient in the operation of these automated machines due to lack of adequate training on how to operate the machines.

          For this reason, some secretaries are working with fear, having in mind that they may lose their jobs and be replaced with computer operators.

          Moreover, cost of purchasing the machines are exorbitantly high and cost of training is also high. This poses a great problem to the existing offices in the establishing.