Industrial engineering is not just limited to manufacturing, but is applied to various fields such as management science, data analysis, and system design to improve efficiency and solve problems. It emphasizes the interaction between technology and human factors, and plays an important role in many industries.
“Industrial Engineering? When I was in college, I think my friends in Industrial Engineering were making pottery……. Is it true that you do that kind of thing? It’s Seoul National University, so you probably have better brains.” This is what my unit commander said when I was serving in the military in Gangwon-do. In fact, if you are not interested in industrial engineering, there is no other major where it is difficult to guess what you will learn just by the name of the department. Therefore, there are many misunderstandings about what industrial engineering does.
Industrial engineering is not just about factories and manufacturing. It’s a multidisciplinary field that can be applied to process improvement, system optimization, data analysis, and more. The production process of everyday objects, the efficiency of logistics systems, and the quality of customer service all fall under the umbrella of industrial engineering. Industrial engineering is a department that trains professionals who solve problems and suggest improvement methods in these various fields.
Let’s take a look at an example from everyday life that illustrates the characteristics of industrial engineering. An airplane ticket from Washington, DC, to Incheon, Korea, with a final stop in Manila, costs less than a ticket from Washington, DC, to Incheon, Korea, despite traveling a longer distance. Conventional wisdom dictates that the more expensive the cost, the higher the price, but today’s management science tells us that pricing based on what consumers are willing to pay is the way to get the most profit.
Why? For starters, passengers on the direct route between Washington DC and Incheon are partly traveling on the direct route rather than using other connecting routes due to wait times and communication issues, so they are willing to pay a higher ticket price, similar to other airlines. However, they are not enough to fill all the seats on the DC-Incheon route, and flying an airplane is expensive regardless of how many passengers are on board, so the airline sells the DC-Incheon-Manila route at a lower price than other airlines’ connecting routes through Asia in order to attract even one more foreign passenger on the DC-Manila route.
While this makes intuitive sense in one case, how and at what level do airlines typically determine the prices of so many routes? It’s impossible to do so rationally and accurately without the help of math, statistics, and computer science. We call these fields ‘management sciences’. However, the expression “management science” is unique to Korea, and in English, it has the name “Operations Research”, which literally means “operations research”. In fact, it was developed during World War II and is one of the most active fields of research in industrial engineering today. Even today, industrial engineering is not limited to a specific field, but is flexible and multidisciplinary.
Recently, financial engineering, a branch of industrial engineering, has also come into the spotlight. Just as farmers make contracts with each other every spring to set the price of cabbage at a lower price in advance because they don’t know what the price of cabbage will be, so many transactions are made in the financial market based on risk. While gleaning is a zero-sum transaction because it adds no value, trading risk allows both parties to get what they want. Many of the trades you see in the financial press are based on this principle: crude oil derivatives trades between investment banks and airlines, rebar futures trades between investment banks and construction companies, derivatives trades in agricultural commodities, pork, gold, silver, iron ore, and more. Setting the right price and determining probabilities requires advanced mathematical skills that were once used in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, and it is industrial engineering students who study and excel in these fields today.
As such, industrial engineering is a discipline that takes an engineering approach to problems that arise in the world of business. Or, to put it another way, any discipline that can take an engineering approach to problems that arise in the world of business can fall within the realm of industrial engineering. Industrial engineering is divided into five major subfields: management science, management/financial systems, data science, system design, and operations management, so it is a discipline that can be useful in any area of business that requires engineering analysis skills, whether it is manufacturing, IT, venture capital, finance, or consulting.
Industrial engineering is also a discipline that emphasizes the interaction between technology and human factors. Ergonomics, for example, focuses on improving work environments and increasing worker safety and efficiency. It’s an important part of industrial engineering, which contributes to designing optimal work environments that take into account the physical and mental characteristics of humans in the workplace. This approach results in both worker satisfaction and productivity.
In Korea’s special environment, where the arts and sciences are separated, business graduates lack understanding of engineering, and engineering students lack business knowledge, industrial engineering can be a bridge between them with sufficient understanding of engineering and business/economic knowledge. Therefore, you can find many CEOs of IT and venture companies who graduated from industrial engineering. A typical example is Kim Bum-soo, who graduated from Seoul National University’s Industrial Engineering Department and founded Unitel, Hangame, Naver, and KakaoTalk. There are also many other career paths. Overall, 35% of the students who graduate from Seoul National University’s Department of Industrial Engineering each year choose to pursue master’s degrees and study abroad, 29% work in general companies, 10% work in the financial industry, and about 6% work in the consulting industry.
Some people liken industrial engineering to a conductor who leads an orchestra of many different disciplines. I like to think of industrial engineers as alchemists of engineering, in the sense that they study and interact with various disciplines and combine them to create new value. In this sense, industrial engineering is a broad and very practical discipline, and the role of industrial engineering students has become increasingly important over time. In 2008, the Department of Industrial Engineering at Seoul National University applied to change its name to the Department of Industrial Management. In the future, it is expected that the perception of ‘industrial engineering’ will gradually improve along with the social success of industrial engineering graduates. Isn’t the misconception that it’s a department that makes ceramics too inappropriate for such a wonderful field of study?
