Industrial engineering’s new tagline
By Behrokh Khoshnevis, Joe H. Mize, Gerald Nadler, and F. Stan Settles

Like most industrial engineers, we are firm believers in and practitioners of the profession. Yet, like others, we have had difficulties in succinctly explaining what we do and how important it is in society. The adverse impact this difficulty has on the Institute and the profession can be stemmed if we state that we design and improve systems.

IIE President Allen Soyster, in his address at the 2005 IIE Annual Conference, presented the Institute with a grand challenge: What is the IIE passion, what drives the IE economic engine, and what can we be best at in the world?

The same questions have haunted the profession since its inception more than 100 years ago. In addition, some ancillary questions would be more easily answered if Soyster’s challenge elicits effective responses:

How can we convey to high school students and their career counselors what the IE profession is all about?
How can we enhance the image of industrial engineering in the functional areas in which IEs practice?
How can IIE better represent all of us and better serve its members as we are faced with new challenges in an ever changing world?
Responses to such questions have been so unsatisfactory that today IIE, and perhaps the IE profession, face a major crisis of existence. The profession must adopt a forward-looking, positive vision of itself so it can go on the offensive in establishing its basis and value and provide exciting answers to these questions.

Soyster presented a perspective that we believe will move industrial engineering and IIE significantly to the fore. We want to provide background for and explanation of his “tagline” or thrust statement: Industrial engineering concerns designing and improving systems.

Designing: Conceptualizing, architecting, and creating a product, process, or system; a positive mode of future-based reasoning; planning and development of needed and implementable outcomes; innovating; embedding industrial engineering within all the planning and design professions.

Improving: Recognizes that the best or right answer is never fully attained; mechanisms for continuous improvement are incorporated explicitly in the design of business systems and processes; finding efficiencies; eliminating waste; maximizing quality.

Systems: A set of interactive and interdependent components that act together to achieve an objective or purpose, specifically for industrial engineering those that involve human, information, and economic factors. System boundaries are situation-dependent. Examples of systems defined at varying levels include an enterprise system to produce goods or services, a manufacturing plant, a section within a plant, a work cell, a specific job; information and knowledge management systems; strategic planning systems; service process systems; and human resources management systems.

Background

Three interwoven threads of background trace the path that leads to the challenges and questions about industrial engineering and IIE: Where is industrial engineering practiced, what outcomes are expected from the profession, and what techniques form the skills IEs bring to an industrial engineering practice.

Where is industrial engineering practiced? Industrial engineering originated in manufacturing near the end of the 19th century and remained focused primarily on the shop floor until the middle of the 20th century. Since the 1950s, the areas where industrial engineering is practiced on a regular basis have increased exponentially in all segments of society – education, financial institutions, health care, churches, think tanks, military, charity organizations, natural resource extraction, government agencies – and at all levels and in most of the functions of the entities.

Paradoxically, this explosion of areas of industrial engineering applicability has contributed to the difficulties in recognizing its value. Most people associate themselves with and “make their mark” in specific functions or areas of human and organizational concern, such as marketing, accounting, information and knowledge management systems, manufacturing, operations, public works, health care services, etc. IEs practicing within any of these arenas gain so much expertise in them that they put their IE skills at a subconscious level, and thus do not continue to identify strongly with the profession or its professional organization.

What outcomes are expected from the profession? The motivations and stimuli at the start of industrial engineering were efficiency driven. Specific aspects of efficiency, such as performance time, motion patterns, and pay, were the focus of the pioneers. Costs were added to the efficiency mix when the initial outcomes were found to be affected by materials and inventory, and then quality was identified as part of overall efficiency. Productivity improvement and waste elimination are the latest incarnations of how the efficiency outcome is expressed.

As the arenas of industrial engineering practice expanded, many practitioners were expected to take part in earlier decision making about how the processes in the functional area were to be set up rather than only be concerned with improving the productivity and quality of existing processes. It didn’t take very long for organizations to recognize that industrial engineering should be involved even in the invention, design, and planning of the products and services as well as the processes to produce those outputs.

Put another way, the outcomes expected of industrial engineering should be, to paraphrase Peter Drucker, to plan to do the right things as well as develop ways to do things right.

What techniques form the skills IEs bring to its practice? Any applied profession develops and advocates a particular set of techniques, however much some of them overlap with other fields. Those in industrial engineering started with formulations of successful past practices, the time studies of Taylor and the motion analyses of Gilbreths. Various techniques have been added since then – engineering economics, quality control, statistics in general, operations research, computer programming, simulation, decision analysis, ergonomics, quality circles, and many function-specific adaptations of these, such as scheduling and production control, facilities location and planning, transportation analysis, supply chains, mass customization, and lean manufacturing. Of course, the emergence of new technologies, such as transistors, computers, fiber optics, and wireless capabilities very often change the way the techniques are defined and used.

One of the most telling characteristics of these techniques for the industrial engineering profession is that most were developed by people who did not claim they were IEs! That is, industrial engineering was “behind the curve” and often had to be pulled, sometimes screaming and complaining, into adopting most of them, especially the operations research techniques that were developed during World War II. Each of us is hard pressed to identify any techniques since then that arose solely in industrial engineering. President Soyster listed 14 competing professional societies, and there are more that arose based on these techniques. This characteristic of industrial engineering techniques is a major reason industrial engineering has been unable to establish its uniqueness.

However much techniques are considered a hallmark of a profession, they do not a profession make. Offering seminars, conferences, publications, and definitions based mainly on techniques, as is done by IIE, without an overall frame of reference for the profession, exacerbates the difficulties. The medical, architectural, and other engineering professions, as examples, have their distinctive tools, but they each identify themselves in broader terms. Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Industrial engineering, similar to other professions, must foster the intuitive and creative mind and not only “honor the faithful servants.”

What do our customers want?


Although there may be other ways to classify “customers”, we will focus on two broad groups: (1) organizations that employ industrial engineers and (2) high school students (and their career counselors) who we would like to attract to industrial engineering.

Companies and organizations at the end of the 19th century sought efficiencies and then over the years added the other outcomes described above. Note that each of the earlier outcomes was not discarded as a new outcome was added; the earlier outcomes were just considered necessary, but not sufficient. For example, the Dell Co. still seeks time efficiencies on jobs even though the change may be as small as four seconds, and lean manufacturing or lean management continues the inclusion of efficiency efforts.

Much of what organizations want may stem from the management fads of the moment that are touted as “the” answer to organizational ills. The flavor of the month -- such as automation, total quality management, best practices, Six Sigma, and lowered levels of decision making -- eventually loses its top billing while still remaining a part of organizational requirements for productivity and quality improvement or efficiency. These will remain important, yet there is a perceptible shift in emphasis toward being competitive and a market leader beyond only cost, time, ROI, and quality measures.

The outcome marker for this new emphasis is called innovation. It is an important shift to include with the broadly incremental nature of productivity and quality improvement, as epitomized by the innovation initiatives added by Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric when he succeeded Jack Welch. It is a word that impacts and could be sought in many functions of an organization; after all, innovation can lead to changed functional areas such as marketing, distribution, finance, and customer relationships as well as new products, manufacturing processes, and service delivery methods.

The issue for industrial engineering is thus simple: Let’s put industrial engineering in a leadership role for designing and improving systems via breakthrough innovations that achieves in an integrated way all the outcomes our organizational customers want, whether for-profit, not-for-profit, or governmental.

High school students trying to decide what program to take at a university would now be presented with a framework that they can understand, where they can apply their science and math skills within the societal work setting they choose, that lets their very often expressed entrepreneurial interests develop, and that provides a major insight to the reality that technology needs integration with people and social perspectives to become workable for society. To us, providing this perspective to a high school student is needed and should be considered by the profession as a “no-brainer.”


What industrial engineering and IIE can be


“Industrial engineering concerns designing and improving systems” is intended, first as a statement of the profession’s mission, and, second, as the underlying rationale for IIE’s strategic direction (attracting and retaining members). This thrust statement offers the following important advantages to industrial engineering and IIE relative to the current official definition:

Length and clarity of thrust statements or definitions. "Designing and improving systems" consists of only four words, whereas the current definition of industrial engineering is lengthy and confusing. The elaborations of the three key words are offered to explain their intent and to speak directly to the fundamental meaning and relevance of an IE’s role in the world. The explanations would be used to answer questions likely to arise when someone wants clarification of one or all of the key words. In written format, the italicized statements near the start of this article would allow readers to seek whatever elaborations they may want.

Marketability. Because the expressions in our thrust statement elaborations are enlightening and understandable, we believe that they will better serve the IE profession and IIE in our ongoing efforts to attract high school students, to convince graduating IEs to join IIE, and to retain IIE members.

Education. The emphasis on designing as well as on improving should convince educators to teach industrial engineering courses with primarily a design perspective and even to set up design-oriented IE curricula. Emphasis in a curriculum and in teaching techniques with an analysis orientation is limiting.

Organization. The proposed thrust statement provides a sound rationale for organizing useful publications for all of our members, for developing attractive and meaningful seminars presented in a context of the larger purposes of the profession.

Public relations. The proposed thrust statement provides a more understandable description of an IE’s role in the world. Consequently,

We can better communicate with the general public, and we can present a more persuasive case for industrial engineering to managers and executives.
It is a recognizable and direct way of explaining the profession to the public, constituencies, human resources departments, and high school students.
It introduces a continual emphasis of creativity diversion and outcome-based convergence in all industrial engineering activities and is a positive rather than defensive way of involving people in developing outcomes.
It provides an ability to incorporate diverse techniques and bodies of knowledge, and establishes a firm role relationship with other disciplines, including other branches of engineering.
It can serve as a framework for developing major topics for future research that advance the profession, for developing design-oriented techniques, and for portraying a major IE presence in all the functional areas of an organization.
The purpose of this article is to support and explain President Soyster’s “tagline” or thrust statement for the profession in the 21st century. The authors believe it is an improvement over the current official definition. We encourage practicing IEs, IE educators, and IE students to assess these ideas and cooperate in a plan of moving the IE profession to its appropriate role in society.

Behrokh Khoshnevis, Ph.D., is an inventor and a professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is an IIE fellow.
Joe H. Mize is Regents Professor Emeritus at Oklahoma State University. He is a fellow and a former president of IIE. Mize is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Gerald Nadler is IBM Chair Emeritus in Engineering Management in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is a fellow and a former president of IIE. Nadler is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

F. Stan Settles is IBM Chair in Engineering Management and director of the Engineering Management and Systems Architecting programs at the University of Southern California. He is a fellow and a former president of IIE. Settles is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.