Role of Industrial Engineer in unionized manufacturing

This article is written by Umang Kumar Singh.

The role of an Industrial Engineer in a unionized manufacturing environment is unavoidable, as it clear misunderstandings among workers, align both workers and management with company goals, and strengthens the relationship between them.

Everyone knows Industrial engineering as Resource Allocation Optimizer, Waste Reducer and Process Efficiency Increasing department. But what about the hurdles, what about the labor challenges which are contributing towards making the function of IE more complex.

Somewhere Industrial engineer also works beyond technical improvement, which requires thinking from different perspective, building trust, and meeting worker’s requirement/interest with our improvement initiative.

If you too are thinking or feeling the same within your company, Welcome to the Union work culture-based manufacturing system: where not your technical skills but your strategic interest toward solving a problem will grow as well.

Let’s understand why we have union in our organization and what are the benefits of having it.

First and foremost, reason that affects is Productivity, which increases by having more cooperative and engaged workforce, which every organization need and if we are talking about quality then yes stable workforce also contribute towards consistent quality.

Other reasons that sound like the benefits for organization are Sense of Responsibility, efficient coordination with workforce, better relation between management and workers.

While some see this as a helping hand, some of them see this as a Detrimental (which is not good for organization) as they see Union based working as barrier for improvements, resist toward change, more political driven workspace, Biasness in performance-based appraisal, and many more.

While it helps workers in many ways, it also increases the work of industrial engineer, whose work involves Line balancing, time study, Manpower planning which often misinterpreted as a department for manpower reduction rather than productivity improvement which becomes a biggest rival while implementing even a small change.

Understanding the Union responses to IE Projects

Environment where union actively collaborate with IE department in discussions about productivity increasing ways, ergonomic improvements, new product introduction, etc.

But on the other hand in some factories, particularly where IE is a newly introduced function or having more focus toward manpower optimization, resistance can be more seen.