What is an Industrial Engineer?

People often ask me what it means to be an Industrial Engineer, and I find that my answer gets more complicated each time. If you search for a definition on the Internet, you will soon discover that there is no commonly accepted definition. When I first started pursuing my Industrial Engineering degree my answer would be something like, "an Industrial engineer works in manufacturing and production." However, now that I am in my third year, have been to a few seminars and am on pace to graduate next year, that answer has changed drastically.

Being an industrial engineer can mean much more than manufacturing. Industrial engineers can be found in all sorts of places. I’ll bet you never guessed that Disney World employs many Industrial engineers. The most common areas that Industrial Engineers are associated with are manufacturing, shipping, and now healthcare. This has led me to a new way of defining what an Industrial Engineer is. To me an Industrial engineer could be called a variety of names, such as a Logistics engineer, efficiency engineer, or manufacturing engineer. 

If one chooses to use logistics in place of industrial, you would likely be referring to someone working in a shipping company. Industrial engineers working in logistics are working on ways to get the product, or goods being shipped, to the customer in the fastest and cheapest way. 

Working in the healthcare field one could consider themselves as an efficiency engineer. Engineers working with healthcare aim to cut down wait times, and increase patient satisfaction. That could mean using colored tape on the floor as pathways to different areas in the hospital, or re-writing data entry systems to speed up "20 questions" game with the nurse beforehand. 

Probably the most common form of employment for industrial engineers would be manufacturing. Manufacturing engineers take products, be it a crankshaft for a motor, a plastic bottle for shampoo, or something as simple as packaging for batteries, and build them in the cheapest and most efficient way. Manufacturing engineers, sometimes called process engineers, take a process and break it down into its most basic steps, then analyze each step and see what can be done to improve efficiency. 

Using these three synonyms as examples, a couple common themes can be seen. All of these occupations require a very broad knowledge spectrum. Industrial engineers have to know a little bit of everything. Another theme is "faster and cheaper." A major focus of what Industrial engineers do is cutting costs for producers and consumers. 

With such a broad definition of what it means to be an Industrial engineer, it is easy to see why I struggled with defining it earlier. The number of different titles an Industrial engineer could have is almost never ending. In many respects that is how this discipline got the name Industrial. The root word for industrial is industry, and that is exactly where an Industrial engineer can find employment, virtually any industry. I've come to find that the best way to describe an Industrial engineer is to borrow an old English term, and the subsequent title of this blog, the jack of all trades.