Industrial Engineering Manager Working Procedure

Hello, here i am going to explain how an Industrial engineering manager should work, for getting the real benefits of industrial engineering department. Suppose a new IE manager is hired to a company, the following phases can be followed in his working procedure. Ok, lets start with phase 1.

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Phase 1 : Know about the company

The objective of this phase is to know about the management, which includes, who all are the owner of the company and who all are the top management staff working for the owner. Next we should understand what all are the expectations of the management from IE department. Also try to get familiar with the different branches of the company. After knowing that we should know about the facilities of the company including floor space, power source of electricity, source of drinking water, source of raw water and other utilities used in the company. Know about no of manpower in the company, employee hiring criteria, cost of manpower, etc. Also know about industrial engineering department, no of employees, their qualification and their skills. Also its better to understand present certifications of the company. Then comes to the core part, what all are the products manufactured and at what rate and who all are the customers. Collecting data on past yearly sales and top items which contribute to 80% of the sales, forecast of the products will help in decision making. These all initial knowledge about the company will help IE manager for arriving the solutions to the problem as quickly as possible.

Phase 2 : How it works

After knowing about company, we should go for the question, How? How customer demand is processed, how the material requirement is calculated, bought, stored in warehouse and retrieved, how production is scheduled, how FG is stored, how long FG is stored in the ware house, how it is transported in to the customers and how on time delivery is achieved. The answers to these question will be most valuable in the next phases.

Phase 3 : Get in to the brain of others

This can be done by the following methods and the basics of this method is, the human brain retain a bit of data more longer when it is connected or interlinked to the other data already stored in the brain. When a new data is entered to brain, brain searches for the data which has connection to the new data and link to it. The chances of forgetting or neglecting the linked data is less. So what an IE manager should do is, communicate all things related to him, such as his education, home town, father, mother, children, wife, etc.. to the colleagues. Communicating a lot about you will increase the chance of memorizing you by the colleagues and they will start asking questions about you and this will built a strong communication bridge, which can be later used for IE department. Also don’t forget to provide data about your past experience, your skills, your outstanding performances to others, so that they will trust in you. Breaking the ice is important because then only other colleagues accept you and your suggestions for improvement.

Phase 4 : Cycle time calculation

Collect the present cycle time of all operations in that company. After collecting the data on cycle time an IE manager can know how long all the operations of the organisation will take. Primarily we can focus on operation which are direct to the production. Others can be done later. This data is very important since all the calculation and improvements will be based on this data. The only method to get the accurate data is the time study. But it will not be practical to conduct time study of products in short period of time, otherwise we need to recruit a large no of industrial engineers simply for collecting the cycle time and the management will not see any improvement rather than the collecting data. So in this situation the only thing to do is collecting the cycle time data from the production department or operator. An IE manager should clearly give instruction to operator to calculate the estimate time from their experience.

Phase 5 : Calculation of present efficiency

Calculate present efficiency of the company regarding manpower, OEE, floor space and quality. Once the cycle time of all operations are obtained, we can calculate required manpower, manpower efficiency, and OEE. I have done a post regarding how to calculate manpower. Please give me some time for doing the post on OEE, floor space and Quality.

Phase 6 : Understand the gap

After understanding the present level of the company regarding the manpower efficiency, floor utilization and quality level, we can fix its targets by discussing with top management.

Phase 7 : Work for filling the gap

And this targets from the management should be the objective of the IE department and IE manager should work towards this objective. For improving the manpower efficiency we can use the following tools such as Time study, Method study, cellular manufacturing, line balancing, kanban, kaizen, manpower reallocation, incentive schemes and automation. For improving the floor utilization we should do re designing of the workstation, re layout of the shop floor and controlling the inventory. Also automation and introducing shifts will reduce the space utilized. Quality can be increased by the tools such as 5S, Why Why analysis, Pareto chart, control chart etc.

Thank You for reading

I know this post is too short for this subject. I have given only an outline, i will explain further in future posts.

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