The Science of Manufacturing: Industrial Engineering

Shuhei Inada (Assistant, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering)

Our daily lives are filled with countless industrial products, such as mobile phones, televisions, and automobiles. Among these, take color televisions for example. How many of you have ever changed the channel by manually turning a dial instead of using a remote control? When I was a child (I was born in the Showa 40s, which corresponds to the period from 1965 to 1974), we had to walk up to the television and turn a knob to change the channel. Although TVs with remote controls existed back then, they were very expensive and not commonly found in the average household.

In my laboratory, we are conducting research in a field called Industrial Engineering, often abbreviated as IE. IE can be described as the academic discipline that scientifically examines the mechanisms for providing industrial products, like the automobiles and color televisions mentioned earlier, to consumers affordably and quickly. It is a field of study that views the entire process—from procuring raw materials and parts for a product, to manufacturing it, and finally delivering it to the customer—as a single system, and seeks to improve the efficiency (productivity) of this system.

This field encompasses many fascinating areas of research, starting with the identification and elimination of wasteful movements in work processes, to the streamlining of logistics in manufacturing and sales, and even systems for passing down manufacturing skills and approaches to "monozukuri" (manufacturing) education. Recently, tools like wireless IC tags, which strongly link the physical world with information systems, have reached a practical stage of use. I am also interested in and conducting research on building manufacturing systems that utilize these technologies. Why not study IE with us to make our future lives even richer and more comfortable?