Summary of
Industry Advisory Board (IAB) Survey 2008
The purpose of this survey is to help focus the IAB group’s interests.
The survey covered three categories:
1. Questions related to Industrial Engineers at your company
2. Questions related to industry and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE)
3. Questions related to industry and university IE departments
The questionnaire was sent via the IIE_IAB yahoo group link to the 80 people listed in the member directory. Fifteen of the members answered the survey, 19%, making it statistically deficient but still providing a substantial amount of information.
Conclusions offer ideas for possible IAB involvement
1. Business areas under-represented in the survey can be added to the IAB invitation list.
2. The IAB draws from the highest ranking individuals in an organization as well as across the industries and services including education and consulting.
3. There is also a great deal of difference in percentage of industrial engineers promoted to senior management. Opportunity to fund or buy research on what percentage of IEs goes into senior management positions.
4. There is a great deal of difference in the way companies promote industrial engineering. Compiling the different ways might be a worthwhile exercise for research mentioned above. Should there be special promotions to help with this?
5. There is an opportunity to change negative perceptions into positive ones.
6. IEs typically stay longer than seven years at a company.
7. Respondents provided a list of ways IIE can help the industry overall that can be discussed/ranked to determine any opportunities for the IAB members to help implement.
8. IIE training is used by respondents slightly (53%) higher than not used (47%). The survey did not ask why nor ask for suggested programs.
9. Most companies pay for IIE dues (67%).
10. Most companies send IEs to the IIE conferences (86%).
11. Most of your companies participate in IIE conference presentations (71%).
12. Your companies support a local IIE chapter slightly more (57%) than not (43%) with most of you stating people from your company attend local chapter meetings. Some have no local chapter nearby.
13. The majority of respondents believe that IIE focuses more on academic than on industry.
14. A high number of respondents (40%) agree that IE is poorly marketed by IIE and offered some ideas to consider.
15. The IIE publications are considered highly useful by 60% of the respondents with suggestions for improvement offered by many.
16. Most respondents actively participate in university events (54%) with a little over one-fifth (21%) actively serving or (14%) partially serving on the university’s industry advisory board. If not actively involved in a local IE department, many respondents’ companies offer financial support to IIE events such as a regional conference and also recruit on local campuses.
17. There is a general positive attitude toward the new IEs entering the workforce.
The following take each question and either plot results for quick assessment or describe the results.
1. Please select your business and industry area.
Manufacturing, broken out into five areas, comprises the bulk of respondents to the IAB survey, 42%.
There was no representation from the following industry areas, either because the representative did not complete the survey or there is no one representing that area on the IAB.
If the latter is the reason, there is an opportunity to add representation from these areas.
Accommodation and Food Services
Administrative, Support, & Waste Mgmt Svcs.
Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting
Construction
Finance and Insurance
Management of Companies and Enterprises
Manufacturing: Apparel / Textile
Manufacturing: Furniture
Manufacturing: Metal / Plastics / Rubber
Manufacturing: Paper / Wood
Manufacturing: Petroleum / Chemical
Manufacturing: Printing
Military
Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
Retail Trade
Transportation
Utilities
Warehousing
Wholesale Trade
2. What is your primary job function?
The majority of respondents (73%) are at the manager or senior manager level of their organizations.
Category
Questions related to Industrial Engineers at your company
3. What primarily do industrial engineers do at your company?
This was an open-ended question with the following responses. There was a little overlap in answers, but not enough to group them.
· Basic IE functions
· Commercial Support: Create sourcing solution for new products by Coordinate and provide financial analysis for various sourcing alternatives; train/coach commercial leaders on how to create a CI culture
· Consult with clients
· Consultants
· Continuous improvement activities involving both operations and commercial processes
· Create lifelong memories
· Improve Processes within the Institution
· Lean - both manufacturing, transactional across all industries
· Make product industrialization from design phase to production phase
· Operational improvement
· Plant engineering
· Plant support - Traditional productivity improvements; lean/six sigma; train/consult plant management on building a CI culture
· Process Improvement projects & direct support to Production (usually production scheduling & production status information).
· Productivity improvement and reporting, lean manufacturing implementation, line balancing, ergonomic assessments, plant layout, some throughput simulation
· Quality and Manufacturing
· Research
· Supply Chain – Management - Strategy: Create supply chain solutions for business needs by coordinating and providing key financial analysis of alternatives; CI Business relationship managers - coaching/training organizational leaders on how to create a CI culture within business areas
· Systems analysis
· Teach
4. What percentages of IEs go into senior management positions at your company?
No one actually had the exact answer, but made educated guesses, with the majority (33%) estimating that less than 10% of industrial engineers at their companies advance into senior management positions. Next highest (20% of respondents) were 11% to 30% advancing into senior management positions.
Here are some of the comments in this area:
“My company has 150,000 employees, I'm not sure where I would even find the information about how many directors, executive directors & vps started as IEs or have IE degrees. I do know a few of them started as IEs.”
“Only a small percent maybe 5 percent of our IEs go into senior management. But many of our current senior managers have IE backgrounds somewhere in their career (maybe as many as 20%).”
“Our CEO is an IE. More than 25%....”
“Relatively high. Most managers either come from technical background (engineering), or from finance….”
5. How well is industrial engineering understood at your company?
Based on the respondents’ answers, industrial engineering is understood well at their companies. “Well enough” was at 53% and “excellently” at 20%, with total combination for those two areas as 73%.
6. How well is IE marketed at your company?
The industrial engineering profession is either marketed well or not at all as an equal number of respondents (33%) were at both ends of this scale.
7. What are some of the strengths of the IE contributions to your company?
The following are in ranked position with the strength mentioned the most often at the top.
· Productivity/process/quality/performance improvement
· Problem solving skills
· Team thinker/cross functionally oriented
· Cost reduction
· Lean principles and/or tools
· Leadership skills
· Understand operational implications/strategic
Your comments include the following:
“Introducing lean principles and tools such as value stream mapping”
“Leadership skills - we are looked to provide leadership on cross functional initiatives.”
“ Finance/business skills - we are highly valued as neutral business analysts who understand the operational implications.”
“Good project management skills. Several important IE projects have saved the company a lot of money (or avoided costly errors). Excellent analysis provided in a variety of areas, often on short notice. IE partners with everyone to help make a project team cross-functional. Great past benchmarking studies. Significant role on supplier on-site visits (usually resolving delivery problems).”
“IE is an integral part of our company. They are sought out in all areas as all engineering disciplines.”
“Excellent communication skills, problem solving abilities, overall process orientation, leadership”
“Human factors is probably the strongest area”
8: What, if any, are weaknesses or areas for improvement in the way IEs are used at your company?
Most comments split to the negative side of the equation. Here are the responses.
POSITIVE
“More LOBs could utilize us but we do not have the resources to support everyone.”
“(IEs are) the correlation to information flows, integration, components, architecture, data design, and cross engineering understanding.”
NEGATIVE
“There is some feeling that IE as a function is not needed, that with a little training anybody in the line organizations can do what we do (and would do it better).”
“Underleveraged advanced analytical tools such as minitab….”
“IE not visible as a profession.”
“New degreed IEs are often not challenged enough their first 1-2 years. They may be given too much production control and status activity that keeps them from having time to learn how to do process improvement projects. Limited marketing of the IE skills (within the company) outside of the production areas. Most IE managers are not degreed IEs (most are business majors), not sure how to best utilize the degreed IEs that report to them.”
“Could be used more for Lean”
“Business management still looks at business through a 'financial' lens, not a systems or time-based lens.”
“Sometimes used to help people get things done because they know how to - but not always the best use of their time. Not used as much in creative solutions. Often involved in too much short term versus long term.”
“Viewed as a minimal commodity.”
9. How long do IEs typically stay at your company?
IEs typically stay longer than seven years at the respondents’ companies.
Category
Questions related to industry and the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE)
10. What can IIE do more of to help industry overall?
Here are your comments.
· “Create workshop or webcast meeting among industrial leaders and academic world.”
· “Insure that the IE profession is promoted to young people to encourage them to major in industrial engineering. Advertise/Promote the benefits to the government and businesses. Enlist IE's to solve the nation's healthcare crisis.”
· “Continue to improve efforts to market IE to corporate America.”
· “Increase visibility and establish relevancy to current vocational specialties (SSBB, Lean, project management, supply chain mgmt, outsourcing, procurement, etc.).”
· “Help focus more on industry issues, particularly at the IIE Conferences, and on many of the IIE National Committees (most seem run by University Professors). Do more to Market IEs and IIE (such as during National Engineers Week) and to large corporations.”
· “Communicate the value of IEs. Still quite naive in the market”
· “Enhance the image of the profession”
· “Education in techniques”
· “Keep the IE curriculum up to date and strong professors.”
· “Promote the industry at universities and trade shows.”
· “clarification of the benefits the role provides”
· “innovate more in the healthcare industry, and support career paths to senior executive positions”
· “Continue to develop and promote the profession so that people value to skill sets of IE's”
· “Market great examples of success.”
11. Does your company utilize the training that IIE provides?
Yes 53%; no 47%
Your comments:
Yes 53%; no 47%
· “Not often, though. A few have taken the PE Exam refresher course; there is some attendance at the annual conference.”
· “Honestly, do not find that much value in it for our application’
· “Pre- IIE Conference training and special adapted training (developed by IIE, specific for our company) has been very helpful.”
· “On an individual basis, not corporately”
· “Intro to Health Care seminar”
· “Most work and training is contracted out.”
12. Does your company pay for IIE annual dues?
Yes 67%; no 33%
Your comments:
· “In recent years (last 2-3 years). Prior to that No, we paid our own dues.”
· “…and SHS dues….”
· “I've been doing this since the early to mid 90's.”
13. Does your company send your IEs to the IIE Conferences?
Yes 86%; no 14%
14. If so, do you frequently have presenters or panelists at the IIE Conferences?
Yes 71%; no 29%
Your comments:
· “Simulation Competition.”
· “Not frequently enough, we should do more of it. Conference attendance is infrequent - anytime the economy is bad, we don't even bother asking for permission to attend.”
· “We could have more; but it can be challenging due to legal”
· “Not "frequently", although I have recruited two quality-related managers to speak at the OpEx Conference 2008.”
· “We try to get about 8-10 presentations approved from our company (for the Solutions portion of the Conference). We have a central person (with staff) that coordinates all of our IIE Conf. presentation submittals (within the company - we have a fairly involved & time consuming approval process with our Communications & Legal departments).”
· “very infrequently”
· “Breakthrough Management Group (BMG) does come / attend IIE conferences.”
15. Does your company support a local IIE chapter?
Yes 57%; no 43%
Your comments:
· “Individuals attend or are active in the local chapter, but there is no formal company support.”
· “Although we could do more
· “Yes, sort of. We have a lot of local IIE Chapter members from our company, but the company does little to help or promote the local IIE Chapter beyond what individuals do for the chapter. The local chapter supports the IIE University chapter but our company has no contact with the local IIE student chapter.”
· “Don't know”
· “we don't have a local chapter”
16. How balanced is IIE regarding industry focus vs. academic focus?
17. Comment on your response to the prior question if you like.
· “A lot of IE graduates go to work for financial sector - they lose their link with IIE once they are in the banking industry.
· “As a business leader, I have not interest in all of the research papers presented...maybe I should, but I'm looking for practical advice”