An Introduction to Industrial Engineering
The Industrial Engineering is a branch of engineering that seeks to optimize individuals, financial resources, knowledge, information, equipment, energy and materials, processes, systems, and complex organizations by developing, improving, and integrating complex systems. The Industrial Engineering generally takes into account the effectiveness, efficiency, adaptability, responsiveness, quality, and continuous improvement of goods, services, and profitability. By choosing this field and specialization for study and employment, students will gain the ability to solve problems in addition to gaining all the pure work experience
The concerns of industrial engineers include reducing production costs, increasing productivity, improving the quality of products and services, ensuring the health and safety of employees, environmental protection and compliance with government regulations. The goal of industrial engineers is to eliminate waste of time, money, materials, energy, and etc. Some of the tasks of these engineers include simplifying the work in the operating room, shortening the production line, making assembly lines safer and more efficient and speeding up the delivery of goods.
Table of Contents
- Scope of work of industrial engineers
- History of Industrial Engineering
- Department of Industrial Engineering at Khatam University
- Industrial Engineering Group Vision in 2031
- Macro goals of the Industrial Engineering Group in 2031
- The most important programs of the Industrial Engineering Group from 2022 to 2026
- Scientific Events of recent years
Scope of work of industrial engineers
Industrial engineers are involved in all production and processing stages. They may design new facilities or upgrade, expand, and remodel existing ones. They may review the design required for new equipment or write down the specifications of equipment purchased from foreign vendors and ensure that existing requirements are met. They may also need to upgrade existing equipment and facilities and design new processes, tools, and equipment.
To maintain standards, industrial engineers must have basic knowledge in many fields of engineering as well as work processes, equipment, tools, and materials to provide facilities, systems, and equipment that require cost, quality, safety, and environmental protection.
To design facilities and equipment, industrial engineers rely more on computer-aided design systems. They also strive to maximize productivity and minimize costs by using computer modeling to simulate process flows and supply chains. Industrial engineers are responsible for increasing productivity in human resource management and technology, but some engineering disciplines concern the technical nature of processes and products. This means that industrial engineering is one of the few engineering disciplines in which the main component is the human factor.
Industrial engineers work in the field of planning, installing, controlling, and improving the activities of institutions across disciplines. The activities they work on include production, product innovation, service delivery, transportation, and organizational information flow. As a result, industrial engineers work regularly to pave the way for the interaction of different specialties and teamwork and make things happen on a regular basis.
They always look for the best solution to produce the products and solve the problems of an industrial or service unit. When planning to run a factory that has a lot of workers and machinery, they think about how to minimize the inaction of the machinery, make the best use of the manpower and make the factory product produce the least waste. Another important indicator that provides a golden opportunity to study at Khatam university is to strengthen the capabilities in the fields; communication, personality, and social capabilities of individuals in a collaborative environment and normal and special situations.
History of Industrial Engineering
This field can be traced back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The need for managerial thinking was felt more as factories expanded since people tried to improve the quality of their products. The use of methods of analysis and interpretation of scientific works, experiments, and scientific proofs in the design and manufacture of tools and machines made the impact of these developments in organizational thinking to be seen. It posed scientific management as a professional attitude and approach.
Some early industrial engineering practitioners are as follows: Samuel Colt, pioneer of the assembly line, Frederick Taylor, who introduced scientific management and the study of time and space, Harrington Emerson, who described his process improvement methods in a book titled Twelve Efficiency of Principles, Henry Laurence Gantt, who developed the Gantt chart for organizational management, and Henry Ford, who developed the assembly line for automobile production.
Industrial engineering was almost based on increasing the efficiency and profitability of operations in the early days of its emergence. Continuous inventions and the development of new machines and resources then posed new challenges for engineers to find new applications in these technologies and optimize their use to increase productivity.
Department of Industrial Engineering at Khatam University
The Industrial Engineering Department at Khatam University was established in 2012 at the graduate level.
The Industrial Engineering program at Khatam University offers the following disciplines at the master's level:
• Logistics and Supply Chain
• Systems Modeling and Data Analysis
• Financial Systems
• Optimization Methods
• Production and Services Systems
• Engineering Management
Explore more about these Industrial Engineering disciplines at Khatam University.
Logistics and Supply Chain Discipline:
The main goal of logistics and supply chain discipline is to train specialists with the ability to analyze, plan and design, implement and improve the performance of supply chains and the current processes in them with an emphasis on engineering aspects.
Graduates of this discipline, as a master, will be able to provide scientific and practical solutions in the field of designing, optimization structures and supply chain processes and improving their performance, as well as implementing the supply chain management systems.
Systems Modeling and Data Analysis Discipline:
The "Engineering of Economic-Social Systems" discipline in industrial engineering was one of the old industrial engineering master's degrees, and with the entry of graduates from various engineering and non-engineering bachelor's degrees and due to the flexibility of the mandatory courses of this degree, this discipline gradually moved more towards management subjects.To some extent, it might be considered as managing economic-social systems. On the other hand, by expanding fields related to systems engineering methods, data science fields, and interdisciplinary fields of systems engineering as a bridge of cooperation scientific studies with other engineering disciplines, the necessity of creating a discipline that includes these topics was brought up more and more.
The discipline of systems modelling and data analysis deals with the study, modelling and analysis of systemsand designs the best system by considering the needs, priorities and available facilities. Graduates of this discipline will be able to provide efficient and effective solutions for complex and large-scale problems by acquiring the key attitude and skill of "creative holistic view". Comprehensive analysis of problems and presentation of creative solutions are the main characteristics of graduates of this discipline. From the methodological point of view, the graduates of this discipline will master all kinds of hard and soft problem solving methods, including operations research, data-driven optimization, data mining, process mining, systems dynamics, soft system methodology, non-deterministic planning, interactive planning and postmodern system methods.
Financial Systems Discipline:
Financial systems is another discipline of industrial engineering that focuses on various issues. The use of advanced computing and information technology in financial markets and investment analysis, the use of financial engineering techniques in banks, stock brokerage institutions, insurance companies and treasury units, financial analysis of industrial and commercial institutions and the use of risk reduction or risk management tools are among the most important topics of this discipline.
Job opportunities in the labour market for graduates of financial systemsdisciplinein the field of industrial engineering are:
• Depository institutions (commercial, specialized and development banks);
• Insurance institutions (life insurance, assets and social security);
• Investment institutions (companies and investment funds);
• Credit institutions (funds and credit unions);
• Capital supply institutions (investment banks);
• Financial consulting and service institutions (rating and trustee companies);
• Stock exchange and other institutions (leasing, etc.).
Optimization Methods Discipline:
Optimization methods and its applications in various industries is one of the main specialized fields of industrial engineering. In the past few years, optimization methods and their applications have undergone significant development and changes and gradually the need to create an independent specialized discipline focusing on new optimization issues has become more clear. Especially in the field of optimization with random or imprecise data, decision making and planning under conditions of uncertainty, optimization of systems with large scale, optimization based on graph theory and methods of solving combinatorial optimization problems, significant scientific advances have been made. Its results have been presented in the form of new postgraduate courses and selected topics in optimization in major universities of the country.
The aim of the optimization methods discipline is to train specialists who, by using their skills and specialized courses of this trend, have the ability to recognize, analyse and present plans for systems consisting of humans, materials and machines.
The most important skills of graduates of this field are:
• Discovering and investigating the problems of the ministries,
• Headquarters organizations and industrial systems,
• Searching for a logical connection between the components of all types of production and non-production systems,
• Planning and presenting the model to get the best performance from the systems,
• Control systems to follow up defects and provide the desired and final model,
• Planning and participating in the implementation of industrial research projects and providing suitable models for the design of huge production units of the country.
Production and Services Systems Discipline:
The initial discipline of the master's degree in industrial engineering with the general title of industrial engineering focused on the main and traditional topics of this field, including production planning, scheduling issues, queuing theory, design of production systems, and the application of some optimization topics.With the expansion of the service sector in the country's economy, new fields for the development of the industrial engineering major, including income and demand management, service system design, pricing and ordering in service industries have arisen and this need must be answered in the master's program. For this purpose, in 2015, a discipline was created under the title of "optimization of systems", but due to the vagueness of educational goals and its direction, as well as the challenges of its implementation in universities, in order to revive the most traditional discipline of industrial engineering and development. In order to respond to the scientific need in service systems and to strengthen and update the main fields related to production systems, the previous discipline of "optimization of systems" was replaced with the discipline of "production and service systems".
Engineering Management Discipline:
The discipline of engineering management is dedicated to the study of the application of engineering principles in business. The goal of this discipline is to train engineers who use the principles of management science along with engineering knowledge to solve real problems in the organization in managerial, economic and commercial fields. Graduates of this program are expected to have appropriate skills in the applied fields of industrial engineering and management, so that they can implement scientific management in various production and service sectors of society.