Seven years after Ford Motor Co. opened the Northeast Industrial Complex in Camaçara, Brazil, to supply the demand from all regions touching the Atlantic Ocean, a single communication policy still exists among approximately 10,000 employees.
Look inside your doctor’s medical bag and you just might find “telemedicine reports” rather than thermometers these days. With the push to go paperless in order to eliminate waste, many clinics and hospitals have adopted health information technology models over the past decade. However, another reason has fueled the medical community’s demand for the conversion: patient access to care.
From the Federal Emergency Management Agency and medical technicians to special police forces and everyday citizens, scores of people have acted rapidly to protect human lives, animals, buildings and natural habitat with some instruction or by their own intuition. Systems are fine-tuned by forensic anthropologists and government officials with every mine cave-in, hurricane, earthquake, fire and airplane crash; their confidential consultants or the quiet ones on the scene are often industrial engineers.
Software is often seen as a quick fix for any process problem. Bottlenecks in the supply chain? Buy MRP software. Process out of control? Buy process-monitoring software. Unfortunately, software can also be the problem.
Is that hand tool your line worker is about to pick up really ergonomic? Research suggests that a large number of musculoskeletal disorders can be attributed to use of poorly designed or misused hand tools.
Dec. 1 is the deadline for submitting nominations for IIE awards. If you have not nominated the outstanding professionals and students you know for these prestigious awards and honors, now is the time. Some chapter, region, division and society awards have different deadlines. You'll find these deadlines in the individual award descriptions.
What it's like being an industrial engineer for Disney.