AN ARTICLE WRITTEN TO BE PUBLISHED IN INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING STUDENT ASSOCIATION (IESA) MAGAZINE.
APPLICATIONS OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING IN A MANUFACTURING SYSTEM.
Various industrial engineering processes are been employed mostly in the developed world and it has since brought about a great appreciation in their systems. Corporations like Walt Disney Wonderland, Pfizer, General Motor and General Electric have extensively implement various industrial engineering tools which synchronized development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials, analysis and synthesis, as well as the mathematical, physical and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems or processes.
Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labour to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high technological application, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished goods may be used for manufacturing other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances or automobiles, or sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to retailers, who then sell them to end users – the "consumers". The manufacturing sector is closely connected with engineering and industrial design. Examples of major manufacturers are General Motors Corporation, General Electric, and Pfizer, Volkswagen Group, Siemens, Michelin, Toyota, Samsung, and Bridgestone.
Industrial engineering is not physically demanding, but frequently takes the Engineer out of the office into production and manufacturing areas. Today, this often means travelling across the country or around the world to the manufacturing site. Industrial Engineers spend much of their time asking questions. They may talk with production workers, as well as technical or administrative staff. It is not unusual for these Engineers to be involved in several projects at once. Therefore, they must be flexible enough to drop one project and pick up another at a moment’s notice.
Much of an Industrial Engineer’s output is used by management for making decisions. As a result, these workers must be accurate; their recommendations may affect the size of their firm’s profits, its labour relations, as well as its productions costs. Because of this, stress may be considerable at times. Industrial Engineers usually work a 40-hour workweek. However, long or irregular hours may be necessary to meet deadlines or when working on special projects.
Industrial Engineers, who may find themselves in manufacturing industries, will be responsible for the following tasks:
ü Operations:
· Review schedules or forecasts, specifications, and customer requirements to understand what activities, and in what order, things should be done.
· Develop methods, labour utilization standards, and cost analysis systems for efficient staff and facility operation.
· Monitor workflow schedules according to established best practices to come up with improved cycle time.
· Study operations sequence, material flow, functional statements, organization charts, and project information to determine systems (labour, tools, computers) design and workplace layout.
· Apply statistical methods to determine processes, staff requirements, and production standards.
· Project system deliveries based on marketing forecasts, supply chain design, storage and handling facilities, and maintenance requirements.
ü Logistics and Distribution (Supply Chain Management):
· Design methods of transporting goods from one location to another. This could mean locating, designing, and building of warehouses for large national merchandisers so their stores can be stocked on a timely basis. It could mean designing the system of trucks, rail and air to supply parts for assembly or repair (as in the auto industry).
· Design systems for handling materials from differing transportation modes and redistributing them in a minimum amount of time; for example, long haul trucks, local trucks, air cargo delivery, and containers.
· Design systems for automated replenishment of stock; such as, scanning a bar coded product in a store triggers a system that orders new stock to be delivered back to that same store.
· Design systems for the transport of people in a municipal setting, such as rail, bus, and train.
· Design public facilities, such as parking garages, public transportation stations or centers, for the efficient flow and safety of people.
ü Facilities Planning:
· Draft and design layout of equipment, materials, and workspace to illustrate maximum efficiency, using drafting tools and computer simulation.
· Plan and establish sequence of operations to fabricate or assemble parts or products, or service customers, and to promote efficient utilization of resources.
ü Quality Control:
· Coordinate quality control objectives and activities to resolve production problems, increase product reliability, and minimize cost with partners around the world.
· Analyze statistical data and product specifications to establish quality and reliability objectives of finished product.
· Formulate sampling procedures and forms for recording, evaluating, and reporting quality and reliability data.
· Implement methods for disposition of defective material or parts, and assesses cost and responsibility.
· Estimate production cost and effect of product design changes for management review, action, and control.
· Record or oversee recording of information to ensure currency of engineering drawings and documentation of production problems.
· Direct workers engaged in product measurement, inspection, and testing activities to ensure quality control and reliability.
ü Material management:
Industrial engineer’s are involved in planning and building design for the movement of materials, or with logistics that deal with the tangible components of a supply chain. Specifically, this covers the acquisition of spare parts and replacements, quality control of purchasing and ordering such parts, and the standards involved in ordering, shipping, and warehousing the said parts.
The goal of materials management is to provide an unbroken chain of components for production to manufacture goods on time for the customer base. The materials department is charged with releasing materials to a supply base, ensuring that the materials are delivered on time to the company using the correct carrier. Materials is generally measured by accomplishing on time delivery to the customer, on time delivery from the supply base, attaining a freight budget, inventory shrink management, and inventory accuracy. The materials department is also charged with the responsibility of managing new launches.
In some companies materials management is also charged with the procurement of materials by establishing and managing a supply base. In other companies the procurement and management of the supply base is the responsibility of industrial engineer. The industrial engineer is then responsible for the purchased price variances from the supply base. In large companies with multitudes of customer changes to the final product over the course of a year, industrial engineer is responsible for all new acquisition launches and customer changes. He ensures that the launch materials are procured for production and then transfers the responsibility to the plant materials management.
There are various applications of industrial engineering tools that are essential for everyday planning in the manufacturing system e.g. Lean manufacturing, Agile manufacturing, Flexible manufacturing e.t.c.
- Lean manufacturing:
Lean manufacturing implementation depends largely on industrial engineer and it is focused on getting the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change. These concepts of flexibility and change are principally required to allow production levelling, the flexibility and ability to change are within bounds and not open-ended, and therefore often not expensive capability requirements. More importantly, all of these concepts have to be understood, appreciated, and embraced by the industrial engineer who build the products and therefore own the processes that deliver the value. The cultural and managerial aspects of Lean are possibly more important than the actual tools or methodologies of production itself. There are many examples of Lean tool implementation without sustained benefit, and these are often blamed on weak understanding of Lean throughout the whole organization.
Lean aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. To achieve these three goals at once there is a belief held by some that Toyota's mentoring process,(loosely called Senpai and Kohai, which is Japanese for senior and junior), is one of the best ways to foster Lean Thinking up and down the organizational structure. This is the process undertaken by Toyota as it helps its suppliers improve their own production. The closest equivalent to Toyota's mentoring process is the concept of "Lean Sensei," which encourages companies, organizations, and teams to seek outside, third-party experts, who can provide unbiased advice and coaching and this leads to the concept of project outsourcing.
- Agile manufacturing:
It is the duty of an industrial engineer to create the process, tools, and training to enable his employer respond quickly to customer needs and market changes while still controlling costs and quality, and this concept is known as agile manufacturing.
An enabling factor in becoming an agile manufacturer has been the development of manufacturing support technology that allows the marketers, the designers and the production personnel to share a common database of parts and products, to share data on production capacities and problems particularly where small initial problems may have larger downstream effects. It is a general proposition of manufacturing that the cost of correcting quality issues increases as the problem moves downstream, so that it is cheaper to correct quality problems at the earliest possible point in the process.
Agile manufacturing is seen as the next step after LEAN in the evolution of production methodology. In manufacturing, when companies have to decide what to be, they have to look at the Customer Order Cycle (the time the customers are willing to wait) and the leadtime for getting supplies. If the supplier has a short lead time, lean production is possible. If the Customer Order Cycle is short, agile production is beneficial. It is therefore the duty of industrial engineer to find out which one is appropriate for his company and apply accordingly.
- Flexible manufacturing system (FMS):
A manufacturing system in which there is some amount of flexibility that allows the system to react in the case of changes, whether predicted or unpredicted. This flexibility is generally considered to fall into two categories.
v The first category is machine flexibility and it covers the system's ability to be changed to produce new product types, and ability to change the order of operations executed on a part.
v The second category is called routing flexibility, which consists of the ability to use multiple machines to perform the same operation on a part, as well as the system's ability to absorb large-scale changes, such as in volume, capacity, or capability.
Most flexible manufacturing systems consist of three main systems. The work machines which are often automated CNC machines are connected by a material handling system to optimize parts flow and the central control computer which controls material movements and machine flow. The main advantages of a flexible manufacturing system are its high flexibility in managing manufacturing resources like time and effort in order to manufacture a new product. The best application of a flexible is found in the production of small sets of products like those from a mass production.
OLANRELE OLADEJI. O
Bsc (INDUSTRIAL AND PRODUCTION ENGINEERING)
UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN, IBADAN. (2010).
ND (ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING)
THE POLYTECHNIC IBADAN (2005).
olanreleoladeji@yahoo.com.
