【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 epending on how they are trained, can bring the rights skills to the right job and they do not need to be in a department called industrial engineering. He also thinks IEs have gotten hung up on what over the years. On the other hand, the decentralized type of environment appears more threatening to others. “If we assume that decentralized will continue to the point of transferring IE responsibilities to others, as seen in the Volvo anization, we will see a profound impact upon the profession, namely unemployment,” predicts Donald Barnes of Barnes Management Training Services. But, a centralized IE department does not guarantee employment for the industrial engineer. Many large panies have “IE” departments where only a handful of industrial engineers can be found. An example is Boeing. Boeing has some very large IE departments, but often less than two or three people within the department have IE degrees. According to Vieth, it is because some of the functions within the department are so diverse Problems associated with renaming IE departments to describe their particular function may have more to do with appearance than with the actual job being performed. While IEs actually perform many of the specialized jobs, little credit is given to IE principles used in the approach. In fact, it often turns out that many of the individual functions and skills used by IEs are viewed by management as industrial engineering. As a result, individuals who can master one of those skills are mistakenly referred to by management as “industrial engineers.” Yet, those who understand the real value of industrial engineering still realize that the degreed IE brings to the job a unique way of thinking. “ There are things you can teach nondegreed people that are basic repetitive tasks,” says Vieth. “But what you can?t teach is how to take what you see, translate it and recognize there is a problem, and then e up with a solution to that problem.” Erin Wallace, director of IE at Walt Disney World Co., would not hire anyone who was not a degreed IE. “I insist on it,” she says. “When you?ve got a group of people who are distinctly IEs, they carry with them what we like to refer to as distinct petencies. Those distinct petencies for an IE at Walt Disney World include their ability to do quantitative analysis. You need an IE degree to be able to do that type of work.” Wallace says that when someone hires IE technologytype majors, they do not get some of the rudimentary problem solving skills acquired from taking engineering courses. Curriculum Since there is a favorable consensus about the technical qualification of degreed IEs, universities and colleges must be doing all industry believes is necessary to prepare today?s IE students. Appearances may be deceiving. In fact, even though ABET accredits many IE and IET programs in the United States, there remains much variance and flexibility among each of the programs. Evidence of the fact can be found in a recent Australian study undertaken by the Industrial Engineering/Management (IE/M) group of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Swinburne Institute of Technology (SIT). The school initiated a set of promotional activities to rejuvenate the industrial engineering name and status. One of the school?s goals was to help convince managers and government to reconsider the role of industrial engineering. In preparation for the events, the IE / M group surveyed more than 150 . universities with accredited IE programs at the undergraduate and graduate level. Of those universities that answered 37 were randomly drawn for analysis. The main purpose was to analyze the quantity and quality of the IE subjects. According to Shayan and Hamadani at SIT, the most important point is that coverage of IE is not yet standardized. Other steps Two key projects currently working toward helping academia improve the overall IE curriculum include the Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NFS), and IIE?s joint effort between the Council on Industrial Engineering (CIE ) and the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads (CIEADH). SUCCEED, which is aimed at all engineering disciplines, is an engineering education coalition established by NSF in March 1992. The coalition has proposed a new curriculum model, CURRICULUM 2 1, as a mechanism to focus its efforts on specific goals such as restructuring the engineering curriculum and improving the quality and quantity of graduates. The second project, between CIE and CIEADH, has been ongoing since the Fall of 1990. Specifically, CIE (corporatelevel directors whose span of control includes IE functions) meets with CIEADH (98 academic department heads from universities and colleges) at scheduled times during the year to better define what industry needs from academia. IIE acts as a facilitator between the two groups to help inform academia. The ultimate goal of these meetings is the development of a clearly defined set of output characteristics that will help academia design an improved undergraduate IE curriculum. This is not to say that these anizations are attempting to standardize the IE curriculum, rather, they are trying to provide basic guidelines. The question of whether the IE curriculum, should be standardized throughout every university is not an issue. Leaders in industry and academia readily agree that there is no possible way for every curriculum at every college to be identical. “ I don?t think you can require every IE curriculum to be cookie cutter of each other,” says Glaxo?s Ray.