Industrial engineering dates back to when Samuel Colt pioneered the first assembly line during the late 18th century-Typically when the first industrial revolution hit the world.
Ever since then, the demand for industrial engineering companies has increased dramatically, owing to technological advancements over the years. Now, the world gears up for the fifth industrial revolution, which is likely to be taken over by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The face of industrial engineering might change, but the intent remains the same- to simplify industrial processes.
This article takes you through the seven most useful applications of industrial engineering, but before that, let’s talk about the basics.
What is industrial engineering?
Industrial engineering focuses on improving the process or design of a product or service. The objective here is to reduce wastage of money, resources, and time through technologically driven action plans.
What do industrial companies do?
Industrial engineering companies have a team of industrial engineering experts who have a solid foundation in math, physics, and social sciences. The team works with clients to understand their product requirements and provide services to analyze, design, predict and evaluate their product and industrial processes.
Simply put, these companies understand the roadblocks of processes and devices and offer solutions to remove them. The outcome is to get a high-quality product to the market within the optimum time. For example, Eigen provides industrial engineering services like design consultation, manufacturability analysis, cost reduction, and more to help the clients improve their process and manufacturing capabilities.
Applications of Industrial engineering in the manufacturing industry
Industrial engineering in the manufacturing industry is of paramount importance, as it optimizes the overall process and ensures high quality of product with less time to market.
Here are some key applications of industrial engineering that help refine the process in a manufacturing company:
- Design consultation:
Design consultation includes understanding the feasibility of a product design and fixing the gaps if any. Industrial engineers take a close look into the designs, and fix the vulnerabilities and flaws in design at the earliest. It saves time and money in the long run.
- Manufacturability Analysis:
This helps in expediting the iterations by evaluating manufacturability aspects of a design, before the manufacturing process.
- Cost Optimization:
One of the major areas where most industrial engineering companies help manufacturers is to simplify the process that costs them the least.
- Prototype development:
Industrial engineering companies have expert teams with in-depth knowledge to create prototypes using new software.
- Quality control
Here, the industrial engineering capabilities help in analyzing the quality aspects of a product before it hits the market.
- Marketing strategy analysis
Industrial engineers are capable of understanding the current market and future trends. This capability helps them to create appropriate analysis about the marketing strategy and help fix gaps if any.
- Maintenance
Industrial engineering also helps manufacturers in creating proper maintenance schedules and keeping a log of the same. This help in reducing the maintenance costs
