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PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT IS defined as gaining a planned result through those who are managed. Management cannot even begin until there is an established performance purpose that is to be accomplished. [...]

MOST OF US ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE EFFORT INVOLVED in purchasing a new car. You evaluated your vehicle needs and how much you can afford. But once you've made the [...]

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING IS undergoing a sea of change in the Internet era. The profession used to be synonymous with time study and work sampling, two areas that we rarely hear [...]

Do the job well--within budget, on time, and for a profit. Sounds simple enough, but where do things get out of sync? Is the staged distribution of the fee in [...]

MUCH OF ENGINEERING is associated with design, development, and deployment of tangible artifacts such as air-planes, automobiles, bridges, buildings, chemical plants, computers, factories, networks, roads, ships, televisions, and trains. Some [...]

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERS FOCUS PRIMARILY ON PHYSICAL ERGONOMICS issues, such as heights, reaches, and motions. However, there are certain key concepts of cognitive ergonomics that everyone should be familiar with. Cognitive [...]

Component part standardization, a widely accepted practice in manufacturing wherein several components are replaced by a single component that can perform all their functions, presents both advantages and disadvantages. A strategy for improving manufacturing performance and maintaining product variety to fulfill customer needs, component standardization reduces most of the costs in nearly all phases of the product life cycle. However, standardized components may have excess functionality that may increase the volume, weight and cost of the component, potentially leading to increased power consumption and, consequently, higher operational cost.

The internal industrial engineering division of Oakwood Healthcare System designed and developed a strategic goal deployment (SGD) process that helped the company realize growth opportunities and market share objectives for 1997. The department designed the SGD process to minimize costs, enhance quality and improve profitability associated with the firm's healthcare operations. Based on an SGD framework used by Procter and Gamble, the process accommodated total quality and project management concerns. It supported the firm's vision and the establishment of strategic goals which were deployed through the company via a cascade. The process also accompanied action plans that accommodated process improvement techniques, change management tools and department consultations., Oakwood Healthcare System (OHS) is part of an industry on the edge of revolutionary change. It must reduce its costs, improve quality, and increase profitability in an environment with reduced [...]

One of the fundamentals of good operations management practices is the "complete kit" concept, which suggests that work should not start until all the items required for completion of a job are available. These items (the kit) include components, tools, drawings and information. Starting a job with an incomplete kit means more labor time to finish the job, longer lead time, more work in process, reduction of throughput, poor quality and impairment of due date performance. This paper analyses the various facets of the complete kit approach by an analytical model that shows when it is preferable to use this concept. The tendency of practitioners to work with incomplete kits is explained using the prisoner's dilemma.

The single machine total weighted tardiness problem is an NP-hard problem that requires the use of heuristic solution procedures when more than 50 jobs are to be scheduled. In the literature, a well-tuned simulated annealing method and a descent heuristic with zero interchanges (DESO) both generated the best solutions for a large set of randomly generated problems. Due dates are generated by defining two parameters: the relative range of due dates (RDD) and the average tardiness factor (TF). In this paper, we define several heuristics based on dynamic programming and then use these and DESO heuristics to solve 50-job, 100-job, 200-job, and 500-job problems.

Some firms that encounter an engineering-related problem often resort to buying computers and related equipment to solve such problems. However, investment in computer systems are not enough and account for only a fraction of the solution. Companies must also evaluate their people and processes to make their operations more competitive. An examination of current engineering environment, setting goals, planning, plan commitment and implementing the plan in small steps will generate cost-optimal changes for the firm., Keeping an engineering team balanced means getting the most out of its people, processes, and technology. LINDA STASKO Technical Information Manager Visionary Design Systems Nashua, N.H. Planning big computer purchase [...]

There is a new-look menu over at The Consultants' Cafe. Good old soupe du TQM and change management pate are off. Perhaps you would care to try some business process […]

Environmental restoration and hazardous waste management are two fields in which cost engineers have promising prospects. In such projects and operations, cost engineers can contribute a substantial amount of important input. Since these fields have undergone tremendous changes in the past two decades, it is extremely important for cost engineering professionals to keep abreast of the changing regulatory climate in order to make accurate estimates.

Companies are becoming more aware of reengineering processes to improve their position in the market. However, it is a requisite that company executives be totally committed to the process to ensure its success. It is the duty of the corporate information officer to differentiate between effecting basic changes in company operations in relation to business processes and traditional business functions.

Going Hollywood Q: I'm studying industrial engineering and I love the entertainment business--music, movies, etc. I'd like to know how I could use my industrial engineering knowledge and skills to [...]

In almost every field of industrial engineering there's a distinction between large scale, high volume production of products and bespoke design solutions. Yet one automation company, KV Ltd, embraces a [...]

Ergonomic time studies are an innovative technique that make use of a conventional IE skill Industrial engineers are in a unique position to apply a conventional skill to a new [...]

At the annual IIE Board of Trustees meeting in August, the Board developed a new organizational structure that it hopes will facilitate achieving the goals of the IIE 2000 plan. [...]

Industrial engineering is crucial to the success of the newest e-tailer on the block Let's just get my bias out of the way: I am in no way objective when [...]

HP/MD: What challenges face the hydraulics industry today? Rivera: I will start off with one that I think is probably critical to industry, period - not just hydraulics. Attracting and [...]

Coors Brewing Co. is an organization built on tradition, but when it comes to engineering solutions, embracing change is the order of the day. As host of this season's Council [...]

Executive Summary The founders of industrial engineering emphasized the use of cost as a measure of productivity for production systems. Over a period of time, engineering professionals have distanced themselves [...]

A Fairview Heights company recently paid $1.5 million to acquire 70 percent of Software Architects Inc., an information technology consulting firm in Chesterfield. Paul Galeski said his industrial automation company, [...]

When a process engineering department sought to improve its practices, it had to search outside the company for benchmarks What is the staff of a department to do when they [...]

Oklahoma City. The World Trade Center. Olympic Park. Unabomber. The Washington and Vermont border crossing arrests. The United States is involved in a veritable world war, and the battlefields are [...]

EIGHTY-TWO GAMES--HALF AT home and half away. That's the plan for the NBA regular season each year. It seems simple enough until you consider the multitude of constraints that have [...]

JOHN AND CINDY COMSTOCK DIDN'T AIM TO BASE their lives on Frank and Lillian Gilbreth; it just sort of looks that way. So it's no surprise that while John has [...]

FORMER PRESIDENT OF TURKEY, Suleyman Demirel, who is both a degreed engineer and an outspoken advocate of women's equality, praised participants of the 'Women in Industrial Engineering Academia' workshop in [...]

Established in September 2003, the student chapter at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has already been very active. Since its inception the chapter has helped the university's IE department [...]