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Industrial engineers design integrated systems combining people,
machines, and material resources for greater overall effectiveness.
In these integrated systems, the person involved can be a machine
operator, hospital administrator, production scheduler, dentist,
banker, transit operator, or construction foreman. The machine
resource can be a hospital, steel rolling mill, commercial loan
department, subway transportation fleet, or road paving machine.
The material resource can be the physical substances being processed
or the persons using the system, such as metal for machining,
patients, steel slab, teeth, money and mortgages, passengers,
or concrete.
Like
other engineering fields, including aeronautical, chemical,
civil, electrical, mechanical, nuclear or petroleum, industrial
engineering is concerned with solving problems through application
of scientific and practical knowledge. But the IE differs
from other engineers in a number of ways, for instance:
- He
or she uses knowledge in a wider variety of applications
- He
or she deals with people as well as things
- He
or she relates to the total picture of productivity improvement
- He
or she applies problem-solving techniques in almost every
kind of organization imaginable
There are IEs in banks, hospitals, government at all levels,
transportation, construction, processing, social service, electronics,
facilities design, manufacturing and warehousing. Hundreds of
thousands of IEs are engaged in these and other activities worldwide. |
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