Who has an English translation of industrial engineering?

2 1 century is coming, and strategists all over the world regard 2000 as the focus of business activities. Is our industrial engineering education ready for this moment? What needs to be paid attention to is the people who will engage in these technical challenges when the industry encounters technological progress in the 2 1 century. In the next century, people will be the most important part in the competition of "man-machine-thing" system. Industrial engineers have played a vital role in the organizational engineering to prepare for the 2 1 century. Their roles are founders and promoters. If this role can be successfully implemented, it is necessary to improve the process of industrial engineering undergraduate education.

Undergraduate education is the basis of professional practice, and the courses of undergraduate education are the basis for entering graduate schools and other professional fields. In order to promote this change, it is urgent to improve the education strategy. Many educators have realized that this way of implementing engineering education has undergone great changes in many years, and the improvement of engineering education is necessary. Educators, employers and practitioners advocate the concept of design and practice, and make it better scientifically integrated through engineering courses. This integration will be the key factor of any educational reform in preparation for the 2 1 century.

Many places are trying to improve education quickly. In academic circles, we already have technical terms such as total quality management, just-in-time system and continuous education reform. Unfortunately, many of these words are just slogans, not based on feasible practice. Industrial engineering should take the lead in reforming its own specialty, which will help to produce a feasible practice model that can be applied to other disciplines. Many educators and managers are looking for ways to apply theories and slogans to practice, and the models developed by industrial engineers will provide the answers.

Quality of industrial engineering education

Integrating quality concept into education is the pursuit goal of national, ethnic, regional and even association standards. The existing model of total quality management and continuous process improvement can be incorporated into curriculum reform. However, due to the uniqueness of academic circles, it is necessary to redefine total quality, which is consistent with the theoretical process. For example, in industry, zero defect is very meaningful, so in academia, zero defect can't be declared, because the success of graduates in their work is not guaranteed. However, the basic idea of improving product quality can also be applied to any educational process. After careful consideration, Klines said: "The essence of education, like the company's service to consumers, cannot be the best and needs continuous improvement." Indeed, a careful review of industrial engineering courses can find out the areas that need improvement, which will help to prevent outdated courses from being unable to meet the requirements of today's society.

Theory and practice

Teaching determines the core of scientific research, while scientific research in turn affects teaching. Effective professional practice requires the combination of teaching and scientific research. Many documents also suggest that some time methods should be integrated into engineering education. Plieske believes that professors must combine their interest in scientific research with their sense of teaching responsibility. Samuelson once described the decline of university education such as waste, inaccurate academic standards, mediocre teaching methods and scholarships. These special problems have long been cited in the literature.

Although many colleges and universities have lowered their academic standards, the number of undergraduates is still decreasing, in order to increase scientific contributions and reduce the teaching burden.

Almost all professors have switched from undergraduate teaching to postgraduate teaching and research.

Reduce the content of undergraduate courses to achieve the set goals.

Reduce practical courses related to undergraduates.

Curriculum integration

Curriculum integration should focus on solving the above problems. Discipline integration should take priority in the education reform plan. Students must know what the world around them is like and have the ability to be a person who contributes to society. Interdisciplinary education provides a more comprehensive method to achieve this goal. Interdisciplinary and curriculum improvement should link those different but related topics, so as to provide students with a wide range of skills and enable them to adapt to the changing society. The form of interdisciplinary integration should include students from many colleges participating in engineering projects, which will help to see the problem from different angles.

The role of industrial engineering

More and more industrial engineering education will enable students to work hard for the integration of manufacturing and service industries in the 2/kloc-0 century. Generally speaking, industrial engineering education will face great challenges in cultivating the leading role of industrial engineering. The current IE course shows many unique aspects of him. In many schools, undergraduate and postgraduate courses are comprehensive. But there are still some basic shortcomings to be discussed.

There is little emphasis on IE's own philosophical system in university courses. Its philosophical system is about the overall design, development and implementation of the integrated system of man, machine and thing. Students have studied courses such as operational research, mechanical design and human factors, but they have not deeply understood the internal relations and mutual influence of integration methods in these fields in man-machine systems.

IE is rapidly losing its value-added function. The root cause of this problem is that many IE graduates have not solved the following problems:

What is the difference between IE Division and engineers in other fields?

What contribution does this major make to enterprises?

The root of these problems lies in the structural and isolated methods of various IE courses. This leads to the narrowness of professional research. For example, today's graduates tend to focus more on specialized social fields than basic IE. This disturbing deviation may destroy the characteristics of IE as we know it.

There is a great difference between theory and industrial production in performance evaluation. In the theoretical circle, the evaluation of value is realized by the number of published results and the number of research funds obtained. In contrast, industry performance evaluation is based on the actual contribution to organizational goals. This has a negative impact on the interactive ability in learning. Students must have professional loyalty, technical ability, comprehensive theoretical understanding and effective practical ability to graduate.

For students preparing for graduate level, academic courses usually have a strong tendency of mathematicization. Although this is a necessary way, it has developed into a stylized method in order to enable students to solve problems. Therefore, students expect all questions to have clear input, processing module and output. Therefore, when faced with complex, unclear and unorganized problems in the real world, many newly graduated college students do not perform very well. Cheeseman pointed out that since more than 85% of graduates enter enterprises rather than the schools where they graduated, most of the teaching should be aimed at these undergraduates. Unfortunately, trying to improve the education-oriented curriculum tends to promote the education of scientific research, thus depriving most students of the skills they need to survive in the business world.

Many young graduates mistakenly believe that their future role is manager, and they are rarely or never associated with workshop activities. This view prevents them from inheriting practical experience and finding the root of engineering problems. Therefore, this makes their solution to the problem short-term, unrealistic or inadequate. It is the embodiment of this phenomenon to rely more and more on simulation models that cannot be effectively used in real environment.

Industrial engineering, like other engineering courses, develops in a closed space. Students don't realize that it is more meaningful to devote themselves to the development of problem-solving methods that are beneficial to the system than to study the system components. It will take a long time for many new graduates to be good at using comprehensive methods to propose developmental solutions.

operational research

A simple historical review

Operational research is a relatively new discipline. It was only after World War II that it was studied as a professional discipline. British Logistics Society, American Logistics Society and Management Society were established in 1948, 1952 and 1953 respectively. However, as early as before World War II, British scientists applied the theory and practice of operational research to the Air Force. In fact, it was two of these scientists who first put forward the term "operational research".

The earliest application of operational research was to improve the early warning system of the Royal Air Force Command. This system was quickly tested in the British war. During the rest of the war, the British branches used operational research methods to improve their control effect. Unsurprisingly, after the Pearl Harbor incident, the US military began to apply similar technologies.

After the Second World War, operational research continued to be used in the military and got great development. In addition, business activities on both sides of the Atlantic began to apply operational research to a wide range of management issues, such as accident prevention, production planning, inventory control and personnel planning.

After the war, the first batch of regular university courses began to appear and developed rapidly. In the early 1950s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cass Institute of Technology (now Cass Western Reserve College) and University of Pennsylvania were among the first universities to offer formal degree courses. Although these courses have been offered in a few universities, it is interesting to note that although a few universities in Britain have also offered some lectures and courses on operational research, similar academic courses did not develop in Britain until later. In the United States and Canada, the courses of operational research are widely offered in various schools, colleges and departments, reflecting the highly comprehensive nature of this field. These courses are offered in the departments of materials science, decision science, statistics, industrial engineering, computer science, management science, engineering management, department of mechanical engineering and logistics. These departments are attached to schools or colleges, such as engineering, business, management, industrial engineering and applied science.

The American Institute of Operations Research defines operations research as a decision-making science that decides how to best design and operate man-machine systems on the premise of allocating scarce resources. The focus of this field is to develop, test and apply models to predict various results under different conditions, or to optimize the results under given conditions. Decision-makers should be able to choose the best result or increase the possibility of good results in a series of given results. The application of quantitative methods is also very important.

Some achievements in operational research

In the 1970s and 1980s, some outstanding breakthroughs were made. Here is how they are applied and their impact on the economy.

Achievements of comprehensive operational research

In 1983 and 1984, Citgo Oil Company, the largest independent oil smelting and selling company in the United States, invested more than 400 million sales from 1985 in a unique integrated system, which combines the mathematical planning, forecasting and expert system of operational research with statistics and organizational theory. Citgo applies operational research system to product development, smelting, supply and distribution of natural materials, operation market planning, accounts receivable and accounts payable, inventory control and setting personal execution targets. Citgo's operating loss from 1984 to 1985 is as high as 70 million, thanks to this operational research system. Optimize

Optimization is the basic goal of decision-making and an important tool in engineering design. Optimization refers to how to maximize the objective function or performance index under limited resources and technical conditions. Over the past 30 years, optimization research, many of which have been funded by the STOR project of the National Natural Science Foundation, has played a role through a lot of practical accumulation and achieved fruitful results.

Linear programming is widely used all over the world. Optimization also includes technologies to solve large-scale, discrete, nonlinear, multi-objective and global problems. Some recent explorations in this field have so great potential that some popular publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, vigorously promote them. In addition, because the optimization technology can now be realized by microcomputer, it is in a new period of rapid development. Since the optimization has reached a mature level, it is natural to pay attention to the expected results in further research.

In some mature fields, such as linear programming and unconstrained optimization, and some immature fields, such as integer and constrained optimization, the research focus will be on fast and large-scale computing. Some important problems in manufacturing and logistics and opportunities created by new computer technologies, such as parallel processing, will promote these studies. Research in some new fields and fields we know little about, such as global and multi-criteria qualitative optimization, will inevitably be applied to deal with some basic daily things.

stochastic system

We live in a world where knowledge is scarce and future facts cannot be predicted. The communication network may be suddenly blocked; A vital machine in the workshop may be out of order; The fire protection system may need to perform tasks without any warning. The research of statistical process will provide us with a systematic method to establish, design and control the unstable factors in the system. Operational research provides us with a framework to understand basic probability phenomena through basic research.

Flexible manufacturing system and computer communication network are complex systems and a good example of so-called discrete event stochastic system. The effective design and operation of these systems are extremely important for economic competition, but it is difficult to fully grasp the system behavior. The analysis and design method of modern discrete event stochastic system focuses on its steady-state behavior, which forms a concept of performance measurement in long-term operation or super-average operation. However, during their transition to the steady state, most systems show dynamic behavior, and the steady state may also produce some execution deviations calculated by the steady state analysis. Now it is possible that this clear cost assessment or short-term behavior has affected the design and control of the system. (for example, various levels of surplus parts list, integrated manufacturing organization or computer communication network).

chapter two

industrial engineering

The real value of industrial engineers is that they are very good at solving problems. Ironically, they also have a long-term problem-consistency. And this problem has always been difficult to solve. In fact, "consistency" is just one of the many challenging problems in the field of industrial engineering.

Today's fierce world competition and tight company budgets force industrial engineers to solve problems that have been neglected for a long time. The company began to reorganize the team structure; The Ministry of Industrial Engineering was gradually cancelled or renamed; In addition, universities and colleges are also under pressure to provide graduates with better training and broader working ability for industry.

On the other hand, today's industrial engineers can use many technologies and tools that their peers could not have imagined 30 years ago. The new technology improves the accuracy and speed, and gradually improves the ability of industrial engineers to solve more different problems.

It is worth mentioning that industrial engineering now has more opportunities to focus on one of many fields that many enterprises have regarded as independent disciplines, including anti-authenticity, operational research, human factors, material handling and logistics.

Naming problem

What problem will cast a shadow over such a bright opportunity? For beginners, with the emergence of new opportunities in industrial engineering, problems such as what industrial engineers can do also appear.

At one time, industrial engineering was easy to define. "At that time, industrial engineering was very simple in solving problems, setting work standards and simplifying work," said Carol Cherubin, the manager of the company. "But now we need to give up those backward definitions of industrial engineering."

Even now, in many companies, industrial engineering is still engaged in those traditional jobs that now seem to be classic industrial engineering. "The biggest change is that the commercialization of industrial engineering makes them competitive and comfortable," said John Pava, human resources manager of Kodak Company in eissmann. In addition, industrial engineers have adapted to this competitive skill. They are vying for the job now.

Jerry, the industrial engineering manager of United Packaging Service Company, said: "If a person can't fully grasp the whole work and only pay attention to individual aspects, then the result will not be satisfactory." For example, Dr. Norenberg said that his company has a research team of 40 to 50 people who specialize in cutting-edge computer technology. These people were once called industrial engineers, but even if they were not given this title, what they did was industrial engineering, depending on how you organized the team.

Whether it is true or not, specialization is the current trend, and enterprises are also developing in this direction. Under the requirements of this economic era, many enterprises are reorganizing their corporate structures in order to effectively organize, save expenses and speed up the decision-making process. In the department of industrial engineering, the trend of specialization is that industrial engineering is not an ordinary industrial engineering, but a professional function or an improved industry. The former Department of Industrial Engineering has been decomposed or renamed. Now some of them have become quality improvement projects, quality services or engineering services, but with a little more names.

Pawa said: "What I see is that enterprises are reducing the use of the name industrial engineering and trying to use some newer names to describe these skills."

Many people, including Rebecca Rui, industrial engineering manager of Grace, think this is a step in the right direction. Her department will be named Performance Improvement Project. She also said: "industrial engineering may be the only engineering major that insists on establishing its position above the department." "We pay too much attention to maintaining our position and ignore our role in the company."

Dr. Wennard Nisha, vice chairman of Henry Ford Health Equipment Company, agrees with her. He said, "I have never found department of mechanical engineering. Our biggest difficulty is to treat the industrial engineering department equally, but there are many employment opportunities and a wide range of employment in mechanical engineering. "

Tony Vance, industrial engineering manager of Boeing Company in Georgia, believes that a person's job depends on the skills he has learned that make him useful, not on which department he works in. And he thinks that industrial engineers have been troubled by this problem for many years, while Donald Burroughs of Burroughs Management Training Service Company holds the opposite opinion. He said, "If this decomposition continues, the responsibilities of industrial engineering will change. As we have seen in Wolffer, we will realize that this influence will cause this situation. "

However, the integration of industrial engineering departments will not bring jobs to industrial engineers. There are only a few industrial engineers in the industrial engineering department of many large enterprises. Take Boeing for example. Boeing has some big industrial engineering departments, but only two or three have industrial engineering degrees. According to Vance, this is because some functions of various departments are too diversified.

Renaming the industrial engineering department to clearly describe its specific functions is more the appearance of the problem than the actual work. The working principle of industrial engineers in the process of completing many professional jobs is rarely recognized. In fact, the personal functions and skills of industrial engineers are usually regarded as industrial engineering by management. As a result, people with one of these skills are mistaken for "industrial engineers"

However, people who know the true value of industrial engineering still realize that this major has given this job a different way of thinking.

Vance said, "You can teach a person without a professional foundation some basic and important work, but you can't teach them how to understand and transform the problems they see and find a solution to them.

Ari Wallens, manager of industrial engineering department of Walter Disney World Company, hired some people who were not majoring in industrial engineering. She said, "I insist on doing this because if you hire a group of professional industrial engineers, they have the unique capabilities we need. In Walter Disney, this unique ability includes their ability to do quality analysis. You need an industrial engineering graduate to do this kind of work. "

Warren said that when industrial engineering professionals are hired, they don't need to take industrial engineering courses to acquire the skills needed to solve basic technical problems.

course

Since it has become common sense that industrial engineers must have technical qualifications, universities and colleges must convince the industry that it is necessary to provide modern industrial engineering graduates. Superficial phenomena are usually not credible.

In fact, although the Industrial Engineering and Technology Appraisal Committee has appraised many industrial engineering and industrial engineering technology projects in the United States, there are still great differences and flexibility among these projects. The basis of facts can be confirmed by the recent research of the industrial engineering management team of the Australian Mechanical and Manufacturing Industry School, which belongs to the mechanical and manufacturing engineering technical team.

The school began to take action to change the name and status of industrial engineering. One of the goals of the school is to help managers and the government reevaluate the value of industrial engineering.

During the preparation of the research, the industrial engineering management team inspected more than 150 schools that were qualified to teach engineering courses at the undergraduate level, and randomly selected 37 schools for analysis.

The main purpose of this is to analyze the quantity and quality of industrial engineering courses. The most important point for shian and Hamdanny is that there is no standard limit on the scope of industrial engineering.

Other stages

At present, there are two major projects aimed at comprehensively improving the academic level of the Southeast University Engineering Education Association, which is under the responsibility of the American Natural Science Foundation, and the Institute of Industrial Engineers, which is composed of the Industrial Engineering Council and the Industrial Engineering Academic Department.

1In March, 1992, the National Natural Science Foundation of the United States funded the Southeast University and College Engineering Federation, aiming at improving the level of engineering undergraduate education. The Federation initiated a new discipline demonstration course, 2 1, with the main goal of adjusting the course and improving the quantity and quality of graduates.

The second project started in the autumn of 1990. It is implemented by the Industrial Engineering Committee and the Industrial Engineering Systems Committee. The Industrial Engineering Committee (the company leader in charge of the company's industrial engineering) also held regular meetings with the Industrial Engineering Systems Committee (98 academic representatives from universities and colleges) to better determine the scope of industrial academic needs. The Institute of Industrial Engineering assists these two organizations in providing information to the academic community. The end result of these meetings is a series of unique meetings.

This is not to say that these organizations try to standardize industrial engineering courses, but that they try to provide some basic guidelines. The main point of view is not whether industrial engineering courses should be standardized in all universities, but that leaders of industry and academia have begun to agree that it is impossible to offer the same courses in every school.

Clark Ray said, "I don't think industrial engineering courses can be divided like cookies."

The problem is the misunderstanding between the types of professional students provided and the talents needed by the industry. Most industry leaders admit that the students provided by colleges and universities still have technical ability. Zoren Berg said that it is unrealistic to expect industrial engineering students to be familiar with all aspects of industrial engineering. Students only need to study engineering subjects at school to help them understand the principles of industrial engineering and fixed basic academic knowledge. Such graduates can specialize their knowledge in specific fields according to their own ideas.

Zorin Berg believes that it is almost impossible to expect students to learn all the problems they will encounter in school work in the future. He said, "I'm not sure anyone can learn all the skills they need in four years as a student." I don't think it's fair to the school and the children. Looking forward to it. "

Industrial leaders want students to work in their environment. These defective areas include communication skills, computer knowledge, business skills, quality management skills and respect for senior leaders. Graduates of different positions have different requirements, so the requirements for skills are different.

Varas, who works in a service company, believes that today's students have received good training in many fields. They have the necessary computer skills. She said that she still saw many graduates without good computer skills. "This skill is necessary today."

Jack Brandli, who works in manufacturing industrial engineering in renard Metal Company, thinks that today's students are more educated than those in the past, but they have some wrong ideas about what they will do. He said, "Many students think that sitting in front of the computer is their job. But the computer is just a tool. This tool only helps you to go to work. Then you have to do other things or continue your work. " He believes that on-the-job education in schools is a good way to educate students.

From the perspective of comprehensive education, Sani believes that the school gives students proper education during their study, but does not give them the opportunity to receive comprehensive education in other fields. The school thinks that specialized courses are the basis of post qualifications, so the curriculum arrangement is strictly controlled, but it does not think that people's knowledge is diversified. Or in other words, they think that after all the required courses are over, the competition will be reduced. As a result, many graduates obviously lack writing and expression skills.

Many other industrial engineers use various communication skills to sell their ideas and plans to management. But it is a great challenge for graduates majoring in industrial engineering. Ruth Katmi, an industrial engineering manager working for Coca-Cola Company, said that he often met new graduates who lacked communication skills. Coca-Cola Company only stopped educating its employees when they learned to speak in public and draft reports. He said that what you really need in the industry is how to show yourself well.

The way for schools to solve this problem in other engineering fields is to set up some non-technical subjects in their studies, but these subjects focus on business management, engineering management, economic planning and economic development.

In order to enable students to find jobs in the field of manufacturing engineering, individual schools even award both industrial engineering degrees and economic degrees.

But Vance doesn't think that taking the commercial route is the best way for industrial engineering courses. I think if we don't learn the most technical knowledge, we look like a useful economic talent,' he said.

Another major of industrial engineering should consider the role specialization of industrial engineering (such as operational research, material handling, human factors, etc.). ) and the marketization of their roles. For example, as Che Rubin said, if a student is interested in material handling and wants to become an industrial engineer, then he needs to choose a very professional school to study, which will be of great help to students' employment. And he said, "don't let students stay away from the working environment, but let them decide their careers from the beginning."

Vance has a similar view. He said, "Maybe industrial engineers trained by universities should be trained as members of professional departments."

Rui thinks the problem may not be what subjects to teach, but what methods to teach her: "Industrial engineering courses in universities should teach students to finish their homework independently."

Rui stressed: "students always imitate the people they admire." If students see their professors working independently in their own fields without involving other subjects, they will feel that they can solve problems without the help of others. "

She said that she spent 18 months training new graduates to let them know that everyone in her organization is a member of a team, which helps the information flow smoothly.

These challenges faced by the industrial engineering industry will make some people worry about the future of industrial engineers. However, if every industrial engineer assumes the role of implementer of change, rather than follower of change, then there will be a wide range of opportunities.

It is found that the value of traditional industrial engineering is also being updated, but it needs to be analyzed and evaluated. As a manufacturer of carburetor and oiler, Franklin Levinston, a senior engineer of Wobo Company in the United States, applies the words of Nasio Roberts, vice president of General Motors World Acquisition Company: "He hopes to significantly reduce the funds needed for purchase in the next five years."

Livingston pointed out that Graesler and Volt would do the same. And put forward the same requirements for suppliers. If so, Livingston predicts that in the next 10 year, it is possible to focus on how to make industrial engineering more convenient. He said: "I don't think it will be implemented as it was 25 years ago.

Some people think that industrial engineering plays a leading role in systems and procedures. Due to quality operation, procedural thought has spread rapidly in recent years. Industrial engineers seeking broader opportunities and quality improvement are now concerned with all procedures, not just a special job or business role.

Information technology and business process reengineering are two particularly important fields for future industrial engineers. With the development of information technology, advanced technology will affect the business process of enterprises in the next century. The joint operation of information technology and business process reengineering may create a new type of industrial engineering. It will change practical principles and skills.

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The re-commercialization of business processes provides a lot of opportunities, but many industrial engineers are reluctant to study them. Therefore, managers have been reluctant to take measures to stop it. Paavo said: "If we encounter problems, they are also caused by our own behavior and our unwillingness to play a leading role in some major improvement activities."