What is Industrial Engineering?

Are you interested in learning how things work? How a process is built? Do you enjoy the rewarding feeling of success? If so, you might want to think about choosing a career path in industrial engineering! Unlike electrical, mechanical or civil engineering, industrial engineering is one of the most diverse careers you could find in the field of engineering.  An industrial engineering has a broad scope where an industrial engineer can easily be  working as manufacturing engineer, system engineer, an operation researcher or else a human factors and safety engineer. So if you choose a career path in industrial engineering, you would have a wide range of opportunities and lot of options in hand. As mentioned above, you could be an industrial engineer working at a manufacturing plant as a lean coordinator or a human factors engineer working at a health care facility or even start your own firm. These are the variety of career opportunities available to you if you are an industrial engineer. This is why I chose industrial engineering as my major.

What does an Industrial Engineer do?

Industrial engineering is formerly described as a branch of engineering engages with the improving of complex systems and process. It mostly deals with the improvement, development and implementation of incorporated complex systems which include people, information, money and resources. In simpler words, industrial engineers look for different ways and methods to make products/services offered to customers cheaper, easier and faster, by improving its process and quality.

A major success for an industrial engineer or an IE should be their ability to detect when a process needs to be improved. The only way this could be done is by understanding the process itself that needs to be improved. Only then you start to identify the areas that needs to be improved in the present system and can devise a method to improve the system. Improving a process does not solely fall on just improving the machinery. Sometimes the area of improvement may lie in where and how people do their work. May be it is a change in routine that is needed, or a change in the workstation design. So as an industrial engineer you should be open to all possibilities of improvement in a work place.

What is the purpose of industrial Engineering?

As mentioned above, we IEs focus mainly on how a process or a product can be improved from their current state. Some would argue and say that what we do it not important; that a product might still be made even if the process of making is faulty and outdated. It is true to some extent. A product could still be made with outdated or faulty processes, but the difference would be that how would you be able to afford them at a decent price. For example, the computer that you are reading this on, the espresso machine at your work place, the steam cooker in your kitchen would not have been affordable if the processes that used to make them were very expensive and outdated. So therefore by improving the process, we also reduce the cost of operations thus reducing the cost and leading to higher profit margins. This is important from a business stand point.

So in conclusion I would like to say industrial engineering is a great career opportunity for everyone as it is a diverse field and offer many different opportunities. There are many more applications to industrial engineering other than improving processes. So if you are interested to know more about industrial engineering, please take few minutes of your valuable time to watch the video below. Who knows, you might like what you see

Source:

• (). Industrial Engineering. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/index.cfm?objectid=4710703B-0EAD-59C0-B6D2309B3335C8D4. [Last Accessed 03/30/2013].
• (). What do engineering do. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.pitt.edu/~ejg40/EngineeringCareers.html. [Last Accessed 03/30/2013].