Industrial engineering

Special Terms

Industrial Engineering: The subdivision of mechanical engineering that deals with the use of machines in industrial or manufacturing processes.

Mass Production: Manufacturing of large quantities of exactly similar products with each worker in the plant usually per­forming only a limited number of operations on the product.

Assembly Line: An arrangement of equipment, machines, and workers so that work passes in a line until the product is assembled.

Vocabulary Practice

1. What does industrial engineering deal with?

2. What is mass production?

3. Describe an assembly line.

Industrial Engineering

One distinction between a mechanical engineer and an industrial engineer is that the former deals with individual machines while the latter deals with machines in combination as part of a system. Industrial engineering is concerned with problems such as manufacturing processes and plant layout.

Industrial engineers must make the most efficient use of plant and equipment to achieve the highest possible degree of productivity. Originally this was conceived entirely in the mechanical terms of what machines could do and how they should be arranged. Now it is known that the effectiveness of the workers in the system must also be considered. The industrial engineer is therefore often involved in labor relations.

Industrial engineering in practice if not in name was born at the beginning of the machine age. People like Newcomen, Watt, and Pickard had to be involved not only in the invention of machines but in their application and installation. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the use of machines for all kinds of manufacturing (beginning in most countries with textiles) multiplied many times. We have mentioned the belt drives common in factories where steam engines powered other machines. These dangerous belts are an example of the problems with which industrial engineers dealt and the solutions they evolved.

A major advance in twentieth century manufacturing was the development of mass production techniques. Mass production refers to manufacturing processes in which an assembly line, usually a conveyor belt, moves the product to stations where each worker performs a limited number of operations until the product is assembled. In the automobile assembly plant such systems have reached a highly-developed form. A complex system of conveyer belts and chain drives moves car parts to workers who perform the thousands of necessary assembling tasks.

Mass production increases efficiency and productivity to a point beyond which the monotony of repeating an operation over and over slows down the workers. Many ways have been tried to increase productivity on assembly lines: some of them are as superficial as piping music into the plant or painting the industrial apparatus in bright colors; others entail giving workers more variety in their tasks and more responsibility for the product. Some automobile companies have experimented with giving individual workers complete responsibility for assembling an entire car; this obviously requires an extraordinarily high degree of skill.

These human factors are important considerations for industrial engineers who must try to balance an efficient system of manufacturing with the complex needs of workers.

Discussion

1. Name a distinction between a mechanical and an industrial engineer.

2. What kinds of problems does industrial engineering deal with?

3. How do industrial engineers try to use plants and equipment?

4. What are some factors the industrial engineer must consider?

5. When did industrial engineering get started in fact if not in name? Give examples of early efforts that can be considered industrial engineering.

6. Name a major development in manufacturing in the twentieth century. What techniques does this involve?

7. How is mass production often exemplified by the assembly of automobiles?

8. Discuss efficiency and productivity in mass production.

9. Describe some experiments to increase productivity on assembly lines.

10. How is the industrial engineer involved in this problem?

Automation (Part I)

Special Terms

Automation: The process of operating and controlling mechanical devices by automatic means without action by human beings.

Program: A step-by-step sequence that breaks a task into its individual parts; it determines the processes in an automated system.

Action Elements: The components of an automated system that perform the actual work.

Mechanical Handling Devices: Another term for the action elements in an automated system.