Industrial Engineers Don’t Need to be Certified

Many nations require engineers to be certified & registered before they can practice, or at least be recognised as authorities in their fields.  Given that engineers, such as civil, mechanical, & electrical engineers, design & construct equipment & facilities which the ordinary public uses, it makes sense that governments insist engineers undergo extensive education & licensing. 

Many of these same nations, however, don’t require industrial engineers to register or be licensed.  Many people don’t recognise industrial engineers as true engineers. IEs are seen more as managers, hence, there’s no rationale to register IEs as engineers.  

We, who are industrial engineers, have strived for legitimacy.  We want to be recognised as engineers, not managers.   We don’t really like the stereotype that IEs are nothing more than technical support for managers, that we are just timekeepers with stopwatches who simply measure how long workers finish their tasks. 

Some of us turn to private professional organisations to attest to our industrial engineering expertise.  We apply for memberships & certifications and boast these to prospective employers & clients.  If we can’t get licenses from governments, we can at least get certifications from private groups to legitimise our IE backgrounds. 

But what qualifies the private groups as the authority to legitimise IEs?

Universities hand out diplomas to graduating students after they had passed through curricula of classes taught by distinguished professors.  We know the professors are qualified because they themselves were taught by previous academicians. 

We recognise the authority of professors not only from their educational training, however, but also from their track records of research & insights.  The best professors are ones who make discoveries, formulate daring theories, and eagerly educate us about them. 

Many engineers have contributed their share of discoveries & insights.  They introduced new ways to construct buildings, assemble machines, fabricate parts, invent new formulae, and find new sources of energy.  We owe engineers a lot for the better standards of living they had brought to our societies. 

We who are industrial engineers have also contributed our share of discoveries & insights.  Somehow, for some reason, however, the same societies who appreciate engineers for their innovations, don’t seem to recognise our IE insights to the same degree. 

Perhaps it’s because our IE discoveries seem more mundane, or unlike other engineering fields, invite controversies.  IEs, unlike other engineers, put focus on the performance of workers in their workplaces; whatever ideas we bring forward, therefore, are subject to varying individual opinions.  Some individuals, such as executives & labour union leaders, would bitterly disagree with IE findings about how well workers perform. 

Many private groups don’t have peers who have sterling track records as those of university professors.  Whether it’s because many IE experts aren’t equally recognised for their work or because there aren’t many IE professors is not the issue.  Certifications from private groups with shallow credentials would not truly authenticate us as industrial engineers. 

We IEs should do what the engineers did when they were also starting out more than a hundred years ago.  We should be doing our own research and discovering new ideas.  We should be hunkering down into our operations and relentlessly pursue solutions to problems.  And when we do find those innovative solutions, we should be then strongly proposing & justifying for their design & implementation. 

If we seek an ideal platform for where we as IEs can innovate, it would be supply chains.  There has never been so much opportunity to improve the supply chains as in this period more than twenty (20) years into the 21^st century. 

We have faced many challenges with supply chains since their inception in the 1990s.  Costs continue to rise.  Items, including critical ones such commodities, medicines, & spare parts, are chronically out of stock.  If items are not out of stock, their deliveries are frequently delayed or incomplete.  And if it’s not delays or outs-of-stock, we would have too much inventories of the items, in which we incur unwanted storage & logistics expenses.  Items also go obsolete due to expiry and changes in customer preferences, which lead to waste & expensive disposals. 

Supply chains also have faced increasing risk and frequent disruptions.  Supply chain managers (SCMs) have been unable to tackle adversities with the existing infrastructure and resources they are limited to. 

Supply chains, thus, need to change.  Business leaders, however, have been slow to realise that.  Supply chain management by itself is becoming a futile option to sustaining the viabilities of supply chains. 

A supply chain is a conglomeration of relationships within & between enterprises which transact, convert, & move merchandise from one operation to the next, starting from the sources (e.g. raw materials) to their ends (i.e., the final end-users).  They’re not really chains that are linearly connected by ‘links;’ they branch out like trees. They’re not eco-systems as glorified by some so-called experts; supply chains aren’t jungles.  Contracts between individuals & enterprises doing business with each other determine how supply chains operate. 

Industrial engineers are most qualified to improve supply chains.  IEs would have the competent abilities to tackle the complex systems & structures underlying supply chains, given that they are based on relationships.  IEs would have the experience in optimising the methods & frameworks used in supply chain operations.  IEs also have the talents to focus on the holistic designs of systems as much as on the processes of specific activities. 

IEs would engineer our supply chains, not manage them.  Supply chains present a splendid opportunity for IEs to show off their prowess in problem solving and productivity improvements. 

We don’t need to be endorsed by professional associations or private groups to be recognised as IEs.  We just need to do what the early engineers did more than a century ago, i.e., we should solve problems and build systems via our own initiatives.  We should proactively innovate, invent, & implement solutions.

Nowhere is it more promising to present our IE capabilities than in existing supply chains.  There is much potential, if not so many problems, waiting to be worked on in supply chains. 

We don’t need to join a club to justify ourselves.  We just need to show what we can do. 

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