What is Industrial Engineering?

What is industrial engineering?

Industrial Engineering is Human Effort Engineering and System Efficiency Engineering.

Human effort engineering is designing human effort required in production of goods and services as well as in distributing them. In human effort engineering the human factor is to be integrated with machines and materials involved in producing goods and services. The human effort has to be productive, comfortable, safe and health for the operator and the organization.

System efficiency engineering is evaluating the production, distribution and administrative systems for efficiency and improving them where needed. System levels studies deal with integration of resources as well as with utilization of single resource.

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Try being a human factors engineer, er, practitioner,

I'VE HEARD THE GRUMBLING THAT industrial engineers don't get any respect. Other engineers think that industriaJ engineering isn't really even "engineering." You're treated as the "soft" side of the engineering world. Give me a break! Try being a human factors engineer, er, practitioner, er, whatever the heck we call ourselves. At least, industrial engineers have the word "engineer" in the title (and on your college degree).

Michael Maddox, Ph.D., is a senior scientist for HumanCentric Technologies. A certified human factors professional with 20 years of experience, he specializes in human error reduction and risk analysis. He can he reached at mmaddox@humancentrictech.com.

IE june 2008