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Whereas most engineering disciplines apply skills to very specific areas, industrial engineering is applied in virtually every industry. Examples of where industrial engineering might be used include shortening lines (or queues) at a theme park, streamlining an operating room, distributing products worldwide, and manufacturing cheaper and more reliable automobiles.
The name “industrial engineer” can be misleading. While the term originally applied to manufacturing, it has grown to encompass services and other industries as well. Other similar fields include operations research, systems engineering and quality engineering.
There are a number of things industrial engineers do in their work to make processes more efficient, to make products more manufacturable and consistent in their quality, and to increase productivity.
To reduce a project's engineering and design costs, it is frequently factored into subassemblies that are designed and developed once and reused in many slightly different products. For example, a typical tape-player has a precision injection-molded tape-deck produced, assembled and tested by a small factory, and sold to numerous larger companies as a subassembly. The tooling and design expense for the tape deck is shared over many products that can look quite different. All that the other products need to have are the necessary mounting holes and electrical interface.
It is a truism that "quality is free." Very often, it costs no more to produce a product that always works, every time it comes off the assembly line. While this requires a conscious effort during engineering, it can considerably reduce the cost of waste and rework.
Commercial quality efforts have two foci. First, to reduce the mechanical precision needed to obtain good performance. The second is to control all manufacturing operations to ensure that every part and assembly are within a specified tolerance.
Statistical process control in manufacturing usually proceeds by randomly sampling and testing a fraction of the output. Testing every output is generally avoided due to time or cost constraints, or because it may destroy the object being tested (such as lighting matches). The variances of critical tolerances are continuously tracked, and manufacturing processes are corrected before bad parts can be produced.A valuable process to perform on a whole consumer product is called the "shake and bake." Every so often, a whole product is mounted on a shake table in an environmental oven, and operated under increasing vibration, temperatures and humidity until it fails. This finds many unanticipated weaknesses in a product. Another related technique is to operate samples of products until they fail. Generally the data is used to drive engineering and manufacturing process improvements. Often quite simple changes can dramatically improve product service, such as changing to mold-resistant paint, or adding lock-washed placement to the training for new assembly personnel.
Many organizations use statistical process control to bring the organization to Six Sigma levels of quality. In a six sigma organization, every item that creates customer value or dissatisfaction is controlled to assure that the total number of failures are beyond the sixth sigma of likelihood in a normal distribution of customers - setting a standard for failure of fewer than four parts in one million. Items controlled often include clerical tasks such as order-entry, as well as conventional manufacturing processes.