Industrial Engineering

I am senior industrial engineering student in North Dakota state university. This is a great opportunity to write down an explanation about the field, which I’m interested in mostly. I am a transfer student from Sri Lanka, and I haven’t heard of a major called industrial engineering back in my country. Although it is a new subject and a new concept to me, I love to work on this major.

An industrial engineer normally looks at a process and tries to improve that process. It’s a real ability to apply mathematical science and concept from the business world in order to come up with the systems of machines, best recourses, best places and best capacity. This major is very adoptive to different type of the systems, because we are focusing on the designing of the systems and improving the designed systems. Industrial engineering is the only major that has combined the traditional concept and apply to the business application prospective. These engineers have great experience in a variety of disciplines, which is essential for business functions in an efficient effective manner. They understand technical situations, and they are also good with numbers, can deal with finance people and they also good with explaining technical situations like, what is general capitalism customer satisfaction and potential, which always make the key role in the business industry. Actually industrial engineering is a fascinating major, because I feel it is important to have a broader horizon in different aspects of business and engineering. I think, this is the future of engineering.

Industrial engineers can work at different places like hospitals, banks, and manufacturing companies. Coca-Cola, Walmart, Nokia are run by industrial engineers. They have industrial engineering CEO positions. You can see, those companies are world famous companies run by industrial engineers, to gain that ability, we have to go through lots of statistical tools like creo, proactive, java, c++ and simulations.

Industrial engineers in a company, are the link between everything inside the process and the outside. Because in a company, we have technical engineers, mechanical engineers, operations, business management, that needs to work together to get a better outcome. A company needs a good personality to talk all of those different languages and link each and every step, in order to do that, they need an industrial engineer. They can understand the technology, product management skills and communicating the new ideas to the business, which is essential for today’s organization leadership challenges.   

Industrial engineers are utilized in any manufacturing business. Industrial engineering can be categorized in to four specializations. First is the production logistic and management which is about process production logistic theories by optimizing planning, inventory, lean time, efficiency of fixed resources. The second point is the financial engineering and the management. It’s specially focused on the financial sector and the risk management using financial products, which is a typical issue right now. Third one is the information technology management which is key improvement of operation management process. The fourth one is the health care technology and management, which is focused on improvement of progress in health care in advance by the medical technology to improve the process.

Engineering has been making huge contributions to the advancement of the technology. I’m proud to be at the forefront of this rapidly growing world.