department will soon carry the title Performance Improvement Engineering.” IE is probably the only engineering profession that insists on wearing its degree on its departmental door,” she says. “we have focused too much on maintaining our degree, instead of identifying our function within our company.”
Dr. Vinod Sahney, corporate vice president at Henry Ford health Syste engineering department,” he says, “I have never seen a mechanical engineering department. “One of our biggest difficulties is we equate industrial engineering department, but they are hired and get a wide-range of jobs.”
Tony Vieth, IE manager at Boeing Georgia Inc., believes that the individual person, depending on how they are trained, can bring the rights skills to the right job and they do not need to be in a department called industrial engineering. He also thinks IEs have gotten hung up on what over the years. On the other hand, the decentralized type of environment appears more threatening to others. “If we assume that decentralized will continue to the point of transferring IE responsibilities to others, as seen in the Volvo organization, we will see a profound impact upon the profession, namely unemployment,” predicts Donald Barnes of Barnes Management Training Services.
But, a centralized IE department does not guarantee employment for the industrial engineer. Many large companies have “IE” departments where only a handful of industrial engineers can be found. An example is Boeing. Boeing has some very large IE departments, but often less than two or three people within the department have IE degrees. According to Vieth, it is because some of the functions within the department are so diverse
Problems associated with renaming IE departments to describe their particular function may have more to do with appearance than with the actual job being performed. While IEs actually perform many of the specialized jobs, little credit is given to IE principles used in the approach. In fact, it often turns out that many of the individual functions and skills used by IEs are viewed by management as industrial engineering. As a result, individuals who can master one of those skills are mistakenly referred to by management as “industrial engineers.”
Yet, those who understand the real value of industrial engineering still realize that the degreed IE brings to the job a unique way of thinking.
“There are things you can teach non-degreed people that are basic repetitive tasks,” says Vieth. “But what you can t teach is how to take what you see, translate it and recognize there is a problem, and then come up with a solution to that problem.”
Erin Wallace, director of IE at Walt Disney World Co., would not hire anyone who was not a degreed IE. “I insist on it,” she says. “When you ve got a group of people who are distinctly IEs, they carry with them what we like to refer to as distinct competencies. Those distinct competencies for an IE at Walt Disney World include their ability to do quantitative analysis. You need an IE degree to be able to do that type of work.”
Wallace says that when someone hires IE technology-type majors, they do not get some of the rudimentary problem solving skills acquired from taking engineering courses.
Curriculum
Since there is a favorable consensus about the technical qualification of degreed IEs, universities and colleges must be doing all industry believes is necessary to prepare today s IE students. Appearances may be deceiving.
In fact, even though ABET accredits many IE and IET programs in the United States, there remains much variance and flexibility among each of the programs. Evidence of the fact can be found in a recent Australian study undertaken by the Industrial Engineering/Management (IE/M) group of