Industrial engineering is engineering management. It improves products and processes. Increasing efficiency, reducing production costs, improving control, ensuring employee safety, protecting the environment, and complying with federal regulations are examples.
Streamlining processes and procedures reduces time, money, material, and energy waste. Applying specialist knowledge and skill to predict and assess process results achieves this. This enables new processes or systems. Business administration activities may overlap with production and manufacturing engineering, operations research and systems and supply chains engineering, management science engineering, safety and engineering, ergonomics and logistics engineering, and other areas.
Why Is Industrial Engineering So Important?
Industrial engineering is vital for both end-users as well as producers of a product. Industrial engineers can improve manufacturing processes and design to increase efficiency. This is a good business practice as it can save money, time, manpower, and raw materials. However, industrial engineering doesn’t just focus on profit margins. Instead, it ensures the safety of a product or process. This is beneficial for both employees, as well as end-users.
What Does An Industrial Engineer Do?
Industrial engineers can use computer-aided designs (CAD) to design equipment, and facilities, or computer modeling to model processes and supply chains. A skilled industrial engineer is required to refurbish existing equipment, create new processes or tools, and develop new procedures.
This may include creating new equipment and writing specifications for equipment purchased from an outside vendor in order to meet these requirements. This could involve creating new products or processes from scratch, as well as adapting, expanding, and reconfiguring existing procedures or processes.
Where Are Industrial Engineers Based?
Industrial engineers work in a variety of environments. These can include offices, factories, and any other setting they may be responsible for. This could mean examining the workflow in a hospital or watching how a process operates in a factory. These data can then be used to analyze and solve problems with a computer.
Industrial Engineering Could Be Automated
Automation is not likely to happen in industrial engineering. The likelihood of industrial engineering becoming automated is only 3% according to analysis from a range of employment sites. This is due to the diversity and types of activities industrial engineers do.
Is Industrial Engineering Still In Demand
Industrial engineering is in high demand. Students continue to be interested in this field. There are many job opportunities for industrial engineers. A lot of industries are still focusing on improving efficiency and reducing costs. Therefore, industrial engineers will remain in high demand.
Below are examples of various industrial engineer roles. These indicate how much industrial engineering is in demand today.
Behavioral economics
Energy engineering and management
Facilities engineering
Financial engineering
Safety engineering and human factors
Information systems management and engineering
Engineering manufacturing
Methods engineering
Operation engineering, management, and optimization
Organization development and change management
Planning policies
Production engineering
Engineering quality and reliability
Logistics and supply chain management
What Does The Future Look & Feel Like?
Industrial engineering was traditionally about optimizing worker productivity and planning assembly line layouts. The focus of industrial engineering has expanded to include lean manufacturing systems. They now strive to eliminate all waste, including time, money as well as energy.
Industrial engineers such as Con-form Group company use computer-simulated design and simulations to map and analyze systems and processes, allowing them to optimize. This tool will be used in the future alongside data science, machine learning, and machine intelligence to improve processes and procedures. As the Internet of Things grows in popularity, industrial engineering is expected to continue growing. This will allow employees, and machines to share information and create new practices.