Functions of Industrial Engineering - C.B. Going - Finding Opportunity and Redesigning for Productivity

The function of the industrial engineer is to determine with the utmost possible wisdom and insight whether and where any disproportion between expenditure and return exists, to find the amount of the disproportion, the causes of such disproportion, and to apply effective remedies.
(C.B. Going, 1911)

Functions of Industrial Engineering - C.B. Going (1911) - Finding Opportunity and Redesigning for Productivity

The work of the industrial engineer, or, to use a yet more inclusive term which is coming into general use, the efficiency engineer, has two phases.

First one - Analytical - Finding Opportunity and Need for Productivity Improvement

The first of these is analytical we might almost call it passive to distinguish it from the second phase, which is synthetic, creative, and most emphatically active. The analytical phase of industrial or efficiency engineering deals merely with the things that already exist. It examines into facts and conditions, dissects them, analyzes them, weighs them, and shows them in a form that increases our useful working knowledge of the industry with which we have to deal. To this province of industrial engineering belong the collection and tabulation of statistics about a business, the accurate determination and analysis of costs, and the comparison of these costs with established standards so as to determine whether or not they are normal. To this sort of work Harrington Emerson ap-plies the term " assays,'.' speaking of labor assays, expense assays, etc., and maintaining (with good reason) that the expert efficiency engineer can make determinations of this sort as accurately, and compare them with standards as intelligently, as an assayer can separate and weigh the metal in an ore. To this province belong also such matters as systematic inquiry into the means and methods used for receiving, handling, and issuing materials, routing and trans-porting these materials in process of manufacture, the general arrangement of the plant, and the effect of this arrangement upon economy of operation. To this province belongs, also, the reduction of these data and other data to graphic form, by which their influence and bearing upon total result are often made surprisingly and effectively manifest. It is wonderful how much new knowledge a man may gain about even a business with which he thinks he is thoroughly familiar by plotting various sorts of data on charts where, say, the movement of materials back and forth, or the rise of costs under certain conditions, are translated immediately into visible lines instead of being put into the indirect and rather unimpressive form of long descriptions or tabular columns of figures.

The great purpose and value, indeed, of these analytical functions of industrial engineering is that they visualize the operations of the business and enable us to pick out the weak spots and the bad spots so that we can apply the right remedies and apply them where they are needed. They make

us apprehend the presence and the relative importance of elements which would otherwise remain lost in the mass, undetected by our unaided senses.

Second - Redesigning for Productivity

The second phase of industrial engineering the active, creative and synthetic phase, goes on from this point and effects improvements, devises new methods and processes, introduces economies, develops new ideas. Instead of merely telling us what we have been doing or what we are doing, it makes us do the same thing more economically or shows us how to do a new thing that is better than the old.

To this part of industrial engineering (works management) belongs, for example, the rearrangement of manufacturing plants, of departments, or of operations so as to simplify the process of manufacture; the correction of inefficiencies, whether of power, transmission, equipment or labor; the invention and application of new policies in management which make the ideals and purposes of the head operate more directly upon the conduct of the hands ; the devising of new wage systems by which, for example, stimulus of individual reward proportioned to output makes the individual employee more productive.

The exercise of these functions, whether analytical or creative, by the industrial engineer or the efficiency engineer, requires that he shall have technical knowledge and scientific training, but in somewhat different form from the equipment of the mechanical engineer and somewhat differently

exercised.

Industrial engineering deals with machinery; but not so much with its design, construction, or abstract economy, which are strictly mechanical considerations, as with selection, arrangement, installation, operation and maintenance, and the influence which each of these points or all of them together may exert upon the total cost of the product which that machinery turns out.

It deals with materials, but not so much with their mechanical and physical constants, which are strictly technical considerations, as with their proper selection, their standardization, their custody, transportation, and manipulation.

It deals very largely with methods; but the methods with which it is particularly concerned are methods of performing work; methods of securing high efficiency in the output of machinery and of men; methods of handling materials, and establishing the exact connection between each unit handled and the cost of handling; methods of keeping track of work in progress and visualizing the result so that the manager of the works may have a controlling view of everything that is going on ; methods of recording times and costs so that the efficiency of the performance may be compared with known standards; methods of detecting causes of low efficiency or poor economy and applying the necessary remedies.

It deals with management that is, with the executive and administrative direction of the whole dynamic organization, including machinery, equipment and men.

It deals with men themselves and with the influences which stimulate their ambition, enlist their co-operation and insure their most effective work.

It deals with markets, with the economic principles or laws affecting them and the mode of creating, enlarging, or controlling them.

The most important elements of industrial engineering are summed up in this alliterative list machinery, materials, methods, management, men and markets. And these six elements are interpreted and construed by the aid of another factor whose name also begins with 'm' Money.

Money supplies the gauge and the limit by which the other factors are all measured and adjusted. This of course is true not alone of industrial engineering; the civil engineer, the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer, the mining engineer, each and all must normally be expected to make money for his employer or client. One of the simplest principles of the profession, but one which the mere technician sometimes finds it hardest to keep in mind, is that the primary purpose for which the engineer is usually engaged is to direct the employment of capital so that it may pay back dividends to its owners. And while this is generally true of all engineering employment, it is most particularly, continuously and everlastingly true of works management. It is much easier to conceive of the civil engineer or the mechanical engineer being retained to carry out some piece of work in which scientific accuracy is demanded regardless of cost, than it is to conceive of a shop superintendent being directed or even permitted to manufacture a line of product regardless of cost.

It is the ever-present duty of the industrial engineer, of the efficiency engineer, to study constantly, and to study constantly harder and harder, the question of equivalency between the dollars spent and the things secured. It is not sufficient, for example, for him to know that a machine sold for $100 costs $75 to make. This may be a very good profit and the machine itself may be an excellent one. There may be vouchers honestly connecting every cent of the $75 cost with some actual item of material, labor, or expense. Nevertheless, the industrial engineer must constantly look back of these figures to see whether by some change of machinery, some modification of materials, some alteration of methods, some higher skill in management, some stimulus to the men, he can make the machine cost less than $75 for its manufacture, or can make it a better machine for the same cost, or perhaps can do both.

In short, the industrial engineer is under unending and unremitting pressure to secure a true proportion between what he spends and what he gets. And the proportion is never true so long as the smallest opportunity remains for getting more in return for what he spends, or for spending less in payment for what he gets. The function of the industrial engineer is to determine with the utmost possible wisdom and insight whether and where any disproportion between expenditure and return exists, to find the amount of the disproportion, the causes of such disproportion, and to apply effective remedies.




The function of the industrial engineer is to determine with the utmost possible wisdom and insight whether and where any disproportion between expenditure and return exists, to find the amount of the disproportion, the causes of such disproportion, and to apply effective remedies.

(C.B. Going, 1911)

Reference:
C.B. Going, 1911, Principles of Industrial Engineering