Industrial
Engineering is concerned with the design of production systems.
The Industrial Engineer
analyzes and specifies integrated components of people, machines, and
facilities to create efficient and effective systems that
produce goods and services beneficial to mankind.
Anywhere
there is a "value-added" enterprise, there is a production process.
The IE focuses on "how" a product is made or "how" a
service is rendered. The goal of Industrial Engineering is improving the
"how."
Generally,
the criteria for judging improvement are productivity and quality. Productivity
means getting more from the resources being expended, namely being efficient.
Quality judges the value or effectiveness of the output.
Industrial
Engineering focuses on systems design. Production processes are composed of
many interacting parts, all of whom work together. Experience has taught that
changes to one portion may not result in improvements to the whole. Thus
Industrial Engineers generally work with tools that emphasize systems analysis
and design.
Since
production systems are found anywhere there is an attempt to provide a service, as well as
produce a part, the methodologies of Industrial Engineering are applicable. In
that sense, the adjective "industrial" should be interpreted as
"industrious", referring to the process of being skillful and
careful. In many departments, Industrial Engineering is called "Industrial
and Systems Engineering" in an attempt to make it clear that the
industrial adjective is intended to be generic.
All
IE's take at least one manufacturing course, which deals with manufacturing
processes, and other courses closely associated with manufacturing. Every IE is
therefore knowledgeable about metal working machinery and processes. Further,
related courses address manufacturing as a system. At NC State the IE
department also includes furniture manufacturing, which makes students aware of
wood working machinery and processes. The manufacturing industry has and
remains a manifest concern of Industrial Engineering.
In
general engineers are concerned with the analysis and design of systems.
Electrical Engineers are concerned with electrical systems, Mechanical
Engineers are concerned with mechanical systems, Chemical Engineers are concerned
with chemical systems, and so forth. Industrial Engineers are concerned with
production systems. In general, engineering is the application of science and
mathematics to the development of products and services useful to mankind.
Industrial Engineering focuses on the "way" those products and
services are made, using the same approaches that other engineers apply
in the development of the product or service, and for the same purpose.
The
Industrial Engineer is trained in the same basic way as other engineers. They
take the same foundation courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry,
humanities, and social sciences. Thy also take some of the basic physical
engineering sciences like thermodynamic, circuits, static's, and solids. They
take Industrial Engineering specialty courses in their later years. Like other
engineering courses, the industrial engineering courses employ mathematical models as
a central device for understanding their systems.
Fundamentally,
Industrial Engineering has no basic physical
science like mechanics, chemistry, or electricity. Also because
a major component in any production system is people, Industrial Engineering
has a person portion. At NC State, the human aspect is called ergonomics,
although elsewhere it is called human factors. A more subtle difference between
Industrial Engineering than other engineering disciplines is the concentration
on discrete mathematics.
IE's deal with systems that are measured discretely, rather than metrics which
are continuous.
Because
Industrial Engineering deals with the "way" something is done, IE
tools emphasize "methods" of understanding systems. The fundamental
sciences that deal with methodology are mathematical sciences, namely
mathematics, statistics, and computer science. System characterizations thus
employ mathematical, statistical,
and computer models and
methods and give direct rise to Industrial Engineering tools such as
optimization, stochastic processes, and simulation. Industrial Engineering
specialty courses therefore use these "basic sciences" and the IE
tools to understand traditional production elements as economic analysis,
production planning, facilities design, materials handling, manufacturing
systems and processes, job analysis, and so forth.
All
engineers, including IE's, take mathematics through calculus and differential
equations. Industrial Engineering is different in that it is based on
"discrete variable" math, whereas all other engineering is based on
"continuous variable" math. Thus IE's emphasize the use of linear
algebra and difference equations, as opposed to the use of differential
equations which are so prevalent in other engineering disciplines. This
emphasis becomes evident in optimization of production systems in that we are
sequencing orders, scheduling batches, determining the number of materials
handling units, arranging factory layouts, finding sequences of motions, etc.
Industrial Engineers deal almost exclusively with systems of discrete
components. Thus IE's have a different mathematical culture.
All
IE's take at least one course in probability and one course in statistics.
Industrial Engineering specialty courses that follow these include quality
control, simulation, and stochastic processes. Further the traditional courses
in production planning, economic risk assessment, and facilities planning
employ statistical models for understanding these systems. Some of the other
engineering disciplines take some probability and statistics, but none have
integrated these topics more into their study of systems.
Probably
no other aspect of technology has greater potential impact on Industrial
Engineering than computing. Like all other engineers, IE's take computer
programming. Specific Industrial Engineering specialty courses like real-time
control and simulation expanding the role of computer science principles within
Industrial Engineering. Further, most all Industrial Engineering tools are now
computer based, with growing recognition that computer assisted analysis and
design of production systems hold new untapped potential. Of special note is
that computer simulation involves using specialized computer languages for
modeling production systems and analyzing their behavior on the computer,
before experimentation with real systems begin. In addition, both computer
science and Industrial Engineering share a common interest in discrete
mathematical structures.
Industrial
Engineering at the undergraduate level is generally seen as a composition of
four areas. First isoperations research, which provides methods for the general
analysis and design of systems. Operations
Research (OR) includes optimization, decision analysis,
stochastic processes, and simulation.
Production generally
includes such aspects as economic analysis, production planning and control,
quality control, facilities design, and other aspects of world-class
manufacturing.
Third
is manufacturing processes and systems. Manufacturing process deals
directly with materials forming, cutting, shaping, planning, etc. Manufacturing
systems focus on the integration of manufacturing process, usually through
computer control and communications.
Finally ergonomics deals
with the human equation. Physical ergonomics view the human as a biomechanical
device while informational ergonomics examines the cognitive aspects of humans.
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