The New Role Of Industrial Engineers May Not Include Traditional Industrial Engineering Practices

The current engineering education focuses on fundamental engineering concepts that have been taught for many decades. Many programs in industrial engineering offered in various universities are often structured in a way that exhausts topics such as process diagnosis, control, and improvement. These programs consider quality, work design and ergonomics, and material flow as the central theme of their curricula. However, they do not focus on the systems view of organizations as much as they should, specifically during the time of organizational change. Due to the recent technological advancement in information technology and opportunities provided by the Internet, many playing fields in the manufacturing industry have changed to reflect rapid market changes and requirements. This includes globalization of manufacturing functions and activities, hence creating a set of new challenges to Industrial Engineers (IEs) in the organizations. Recently, we have learned that General Motors (GM) Corporation has been seriously considering a dramatic change in their industrial engineering departments worldwide. There has even been talks in GM regarding elimination of industrial engineers and distributing their main functions and activities to the process operators. Many other manufacturing organizations are mainly focusing on the process and system changes and improvement as they link to the ir overall industry supply chain. Therefore, these organizations seek industrial engineers with more knowledge and education in systems engineering and optimization than process improvement and operator safety. In addition, the P ge 9.278.1 2 introduction and implementation of improvement initiatives such as Lean Manufacturing system has resulted in reduction of traditional activities of IEs. This paper focuses on a new role of industrial engineers as they are being redefined by the manufacturing industry in the field. It explains the results of a pilot study on IE’s new required roles in a large corporation. This paper also discusses a new wave of business/enterprise solutions that are aimed to optimize organizational effectiveness and efficiency by IEs. MIGRATION FROM MICRO-IE TO MACRO-IE The recent technological advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has created profound impacts in the use of resources particularly time and money by the production systems when they aim to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. That is, the faster and less costly the improvement efforts are, the quicker organizations accept to implement them. However, the changing times in production systems has proven to have one major obstacle: the cultural change. Because of this hurdle, the leaders of organizations have learned to be extra careful on the promises made by their selected improvement philosophy. They have decided to invest more on sustainability of improvement and longevity of benefits to their stakeholders, primarily their customers and employees. As a result, improvement initiatives that offer comprehensive and fundamental cultural and structural changes are more and more preferred by business leaders. Two of most widely accepted and commonly implemented improvement philosophies during the recent years are Lean Production Systems (LPS) and Six Sigma among the US industries. Although the name has been changed to reflect the organization’s individuality, the principles of LPS, pioneered by Toyota Corporation as Toyota Production System (TPS), have been heavily adopted and practiced by big three US auto makers (General Motors Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and DaimlerChrysler Corporation). The Six Sigma approach, pioneered by Motorola Corporation, has been revitalized and widely practiced by General Electric Corporation (GE). In both cases, numerous success stories are recorded in the literature. Organizations that have implemented or are implementing LPS or Six Sigma are naturally redesigning their organizational structure and redefining their employees’ functionalities (i.e., changing their organizational culture). This process of change has and is seriously affecting the role of industrial engineering in these organizations. For example, General Motors Corporation has been implementing LPS under their own name called General Motors Global Manufacturing Systems (GM-GMS) for the past several years. GM defines Global Manufacturing System as “a single, common, competitive manufacturing system, consistent with Quality Network Principles, using best processes, practices, and technologies to support General Motors’ Vision of World Leadership and Global Customer Enthusiasm” (General Motors, 2002). More specifically, our investigation on GM-GMS indicates that GM has developed it to implement lean manufacturing principles in current and future production processes, in correlation with its Business Priorities. These principles include the following: Continuous Improvement, Standardization, Built-In Quality, Short Lead Time, and People Page 9.278.2 3 Involvement (GM-GMS Guide, 1999). These five principles of GMS, illustrated by Figure 1, are initiated in process redesign and redefinition. FIGURE 1: GMS Goals and Principles Our investigation further revealed that industrial engineering has established and supervised production systems in every one of the General Motors facilities for many decades, but with the implementation of GMS, the role has been changed resulting in significant cost management implications (Rodriguez, 2003). For example today at GM, industrial engineers are heavily involved in identifying the operational financial issues and, in many instances, helping with accounting/finance functions. These are activities that they did not traditionally practice as a regular part of their responsibilities. According to GM’s management, these changes are the result of implementing GMS that inherently includes many of traditional IE functions and activities. These activities either are embedded within the GMS process redefinition, eliminated/standardized or are shifted to floor/line operators. Among these activities include time and motion study, statistical process control activities, work place design, and many human factors/ergonomics related principles for operator safety. By the use of advanced computer software modeling and simulations devices, the production processes are redesigned and the related activities are redefined accordingly. With the role changes, the title change has taken place and industrial engineers at GM are now re-titled to Competitive Operation Engineer (COE) (Rodriguez, 2003). As a result, under GM’s Global Safety People-Oriented Company Competitive Cost Attractive Product Good Customer Response GOALS Built-in Quality Standardization People Involvement Continuous Improvement