【正文】 and universities and colleges are under even greater pressure to provide industry with graduates who are better trained to handle a much wider variety of job responsibilities. On the other hand, today?s IE has at his or her disposal more technology and tools than the IE of 30 years ago could have ever imagined. New technologies have improved accuracy and speed and generally have increased the IE?s ability to cover a more diverse set of interests. In addition, the IE now has a greater opportunity to concentrate on any one of a broad variety of areas that many panies now recognize as individual departmentsincluding simulation, operations research, ergonomics, material handling and logistics. The name game What problems could possibly throw a shadow on such a bright array of opportunities? For starters, as new opportunities have developed for the IE, new questions have formed about what types of jobs the industrial engineer is qualified to perform. At one time, it was easier to define what an IE did .” Industrial engineering was simple in those days when we dealt with methods, work standards and work simplification,” says Carlos Cherubin, director of engineering for The Limited Co. “But there has to be some way to get past the old industrial engineering definition.” Even today, in many panies, IEs are still performing type of work that makes up what is now considered classical IE.” “The big change is that the mercialization of a lot of these areas have turned them into ?niche thrusts,?” says John Powers, director of the management service department at Eastman Kodak Co. While IEs have always been very adaptable to these “thrusts” as a skill set, he says ,they are now peting for the headlines. Says Jerry Zollenberg, director of IE for United Parcel Service, “If a person loses slight of the total job and stars looking at the individual pieces, it es out a little hairy.” For example, Zollenberg says that he has an operations research(OR) group of 40 to 50 individual who are working on the cutting edge of puter technology. At one time these people were designated as IEs. But Zollenberg says that even through they are not called IEs, the job they are doing is certainly IEoriented and could be IE, depending on how you set up the anization. Like it or not, the trend today is specialization, and panies are following suit. Tough economic times are forcing many panies to redefine corporate structures, with a primary goal of flatting their anization in an attempt to cut costs and speed the decisionmaking process. In the case of the IE department, that trend has moved departmental names from the generic “IE” to special functions or areas that are being performed. Former IE departments have been decentralized or renamed and are now described using such terms as Quality Improvement Engineering, Management Service or Engineering Service, just to name a few. “ What I see is panies getting away from the IE name and trying to have names that are more descriptive of the broader set of skills,” says Powers. For many, including Rebecca Ray, IE manager at Glaxo Inc., it is a step in the right direction. Her department will soon carry the title Performance Improvement Engineering.” IE is probably the only engineering profession that insists on wearing its degree on its departmental door,” she says. “we have focused too much on maintaining our degree, instead of identifying our function within our pany.” Dr. Vinod Sahney, corporate vice president at Henry Ford health Syste engineering department,” he says, “I have never seen a mechanical engineering department. “One of our biggest difficulties is we equate industrial engineering department, but they are hired and get a widerange of jobs.” Tony Vieth, IE manager at Boeing Geia Inc., believes that the individual person, depending 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