工业工程革命-外文文献

THE INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING REVOLUTION

by SAMUEL EILON, Ph.D., M.I.Prod.E.

Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering,

Israel Institute of Technology.

Summary

Classical industrial engineering was based on five main foundations: the rule of intuition, the philosophy of the one best way, the deterministic system, the principle of simplification and the classical methods of experimentation. Intuition rarely yields satisfactory results in complicated systems and is giving way to operational research techniques. The philosophy of the one best way has been replaced by the philosophy of the better way, and the deterministic methods by statistical analysis.

We are increasingly aware of the inadequacy of the principle of simplification and believe that industrial operations are inherently complex and require a new approach to their study. The Hawthorne experiments demonstrated the effect of observation on the observed system and also emphasized the necessity of devising new methods for industrial engineering research and study of administrative behaviour.

INDUSTRIAL engineering is a comparatively young subject, which grew with the rapid industrial development of Western Europe and America, until in recent years it began to occupy an honourable position in institutions of higher learning. The pioneers in this field endeavoured, at the beginning of the century, to establish it on scientific foundations, to formulate " laws" which would describe and explain phenomena and relations between cause and effect, and to outline principles for procedure and organisation in order to achieve a desirable level of performance. But, with all its “scientific" principles, industrial engineering remained more an art than a science. The success of experts in the field can perhaps be attributed more to a sixth sense based on accumulated experience than to the application of set laws and principles, which are supposed to lead the engineer step by step to the desirable solution.

Like many other subjects, industrial engineering has experienced in the past two decades a rapid development, which led to a drastic change in views and outlook. The classical industrial engineering can be said to have been established on the following five foundations:

the rule of intuition;

the philosophy of the one best way;

the deterministic system;

the principle of simplification; and

the classic methods of experimentation in physics.

I shall try to review in this Paper the changes in our understanding of these basic concepts and the way they affect our whole approach to and evaluation of industrial engineering problems. We are now experiencing literally a revolution in this field of engineering, a revolution that will transform it into a completely new engineering