The domain of industrial and systems engineering
Definition of
Industrial and Systems Engineering
According
with Womack and Jones (1996),
an Industrial and Systems Engineer is one who is concerned with the
design, installation, and improvement of integrated systems of
people, material, information, equipment, and energy by drawing upon
specialized knowledge and skills in the mathematical, physical, and
social sciences, together with the principles and methods of
engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate the
results to be obtained from such systems’’.
The
work of and industrial and systems engineering
But,
what kind of system is it that Industrial and Systems Engineering
work to optimize? In the context of organizations, we can say that
the ultimate system of interest is the extended enterprise.
Industrial
and system engineers must see how performance improvement in the
target subsystem (warehouse layout, work cell configuration, display
/human-equipment interface, queue design, simulation, supply chain,
etc.) serves the higher good or works to optimize the performance of
the larger system.
The
domain of industrial and systems engineering
Basically,
industrial and systems engineering works in four areas: manufacturing
systems engineering, management systems, operations research and
human factors engineering. Of course, each of these areas needs basic
knowledge of mathematics, accounting, economics, statistics,
psychology, etc.
A
simple representation of the domain of industrial and systems
engineering is shown below.
The
Industrial and systems engineering value proposition isn’t only
knowledge; it is the ability to reduce that knowledge to practice in
such a way that it produces positive business results.
