.Ebook #09-15 - Cost Reduction Via Industrial Engineering

SYNOPSIS

Efficiency and keeping all employees profitably productive is the key to greater profits. That goal of constantly coming up with ways to reduce costs is one today's businesses greatest opportunities. The responsibility for increased productivity, efficiency and cost avoidance is usually delegated to an Industrial Engineering ("I.E.") department.

Two kinds of cost-avoidance approaches are in use today; one is industrial engineering where highly trained and disciplined people do all the pre-thinking, preplanning, professionalism and objectiveness required to reduce costs and then they sell the improvement ideas to management and the people who do the work. That department's greatest enemy is worker's resistance to change.

Anticipating change resistance has given birth to a different type of Industrial Engineer. The new approach is called "Enginearing" where less industrial engineering skills and more people-dealing skills are used. Enginears are trained to actively solicit cost avoidance ideas from the people who do the work. S/he listens to their ideas and suggestions, evaluates them for validity and then installs them with less hostile change resistance then the Industrial Engineer usually encounters (after all, why should people argue with their own ideas).

Either way, the Industrial Engineer or Enginear are “Helpers,” providing a service to management and worker. This eBook contains forward-thinking engineering approaches, ideas, suggestions, wisdom and tools to provide an easily understood roadmap as to what your engineering department should look like; what the department's people should be responsible to do, who they should be responsible to and what authorities they should be given to enable them to fulfill their assigned tasks.