Both products and processes are designed by design teams. Where is the scope for industrial engineering to do further improvements?
Developments in engineering, scope for creativity application of existing knowledge as the issue is repeatedly examined for improvement, learning effect where ideas come with experience that is repeatedly doing a thing. Both creativity and learning effect occur in all employees of the organization including industrial engineers, production engineers, supervisors and operators. Industrial engineers, therefore have an opportunity to do continuous improvement of processes and products in the organizations through observation of processes, evaluation of recorded data, special studies, and involving all employees in process improvement and product improvement through suggestion schemes, brainstorming sessions, experimental projects, and trial demonstrations.
Design of the Product, Process and Production Facilities
At the time a new product or service is being designed or developed, consideration is always given to the system or process that will be required to manufacture the product or the service. Similarly when the process is being designed and various decisions regarding resources for production (equipment and tools for both production and working environment maintenance)are taken, any modifications required in the product design are evaluated.
At the design stage every effort is made to embed the knowledge available in published literature and from the internal sources of the organization are fully utilized to come up with the product and production system. Industrial engineers also contribute their knowledge and inputs at this stage.
Productivity Improvement - Industrial Engineering
Once the new product is introduced in the factory operations, the experience of the operators starts getting recorded. Operators, supervisors and engineers start identifying scope for further improvement of the process first and then the product. Also over the period, conditions in the market and operations facilities keep changing. Factors such as volume demanded and quality demanded in the market change. The kinds of raw materials, standard parts and their prices change. Better machines, equipment and accessories may become available. Therefore, the organization is confronted with the opportunity to improve products, processes and methods. Some of these possible changes are investigated and implemented by the product and process design teams of the organization. But it is the industrial engineering department that is given the responsibility to improve the product and process from the productivity improvement point of view incrementally periodically. The opportunities provided by the engineering, technology and supply organizations and the creative thinking of the internal employees based on their experience and increasing knowledge and expertise are to be coupled with the engineering and technical knowledge of the industrial engineers directed by productivity science.
Developments in productivity science, productivity engineering and productivity management disciplines are to be combined and the organization has to be taken forward in the productivity dimension.
If competitors go ahead in the productivity dimension, year after year, the business will face survival crisis.
Industrial engineering is concerned with both machine effort and human effort in operations of the process.
It has to be done at element level in machines, operators, work place layout, working conditions, and elements of operations and processes.
R.M. Barnes, Ch. 6 Work Methods Design - Developing a Better Method.
Motion and Time Study, 7th Edition, John Wiley, 1980, page 50.
Updated 19.5.2022, 29 Oct 2020
13.9.2020
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