Thanks for the confirmation and update, Bill, over the many years I've been
working I've done things from counter sales, to manufacturing, to logistics, and accounting - in every endeavour everyone in a supervisory role of some sort collected and kept data on the work and analysed it, but usually in their head. Heck, I've even seen brickies doing it to work out if a particular labourer was pulling his weight or not.
I suspect the differences are now a lot of it is being collected electronically, and it's also affected lower levels of admin people than before. But I did wonder what I was not seeing in the article.