Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

What does my industrial engineering prof mean?

I’m a first-year university student and I’m taking Intro to Industrial Engineering 101 just to see if I’d be interested in becoming an engineer. As our first assignment, our professor asked us to go to 4 retail stores and to analyze, graph, or do whatever to be able explain the system each of those stores use to provide service to the customers. I and several other people in the class are a little clueless as to what he meant. How exactly would this assignment look on paper?

One thing you might do is follow a customer as he or she walks into the store. How long does it take before they’re greeted? How long before they’re helped in a particular section of the store? How long to check out? You could do this for 10 customers, and get a decent average to measure the service time. Then you could compare from store to store, or between busy times and light times.

You might decide that time of service isn’t necessarily the only important measure, so you could figure out something else. Maybe you could look at the number of people helped by certain employees, or the average distance a customer has to park from the entrance.

Those are some things I’d look at. I hope that helps you out!

(By the way, there are huge differences between engineering fields, and industrial engineering is probably the most different from any other. If you want a real feel for whether you want to be an engineer, see if your university offers an Intro to Engineering course. At my school, it was a one credit class, and we visited a different department each week - mechanical, aerospace, chemical, computer, industrial, etc. That was a big help for me to decide to study engineering, and aerospace in particular. Good luck!)

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3 Responses to “What does my industrial engineering prof mean?”

tomsing98 Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

One thing you might do is follow a customer as he or she walks into the store. How long does it take before they’re greeted? How long before they’re helped in a particular section of the store? How long to check out? You could do this for 10 customers, and get a decent average to measure the service time. Then you could compare from store to store, or between busy times and light times.

You might decide that time of service isn’t necessarily the only important measure, so you could figure out something else. Maybe you could look at the number of people helped by certain employees, or the average distance a customer has to park from the entrance.

Those are some things I’d look at. I hope that helps you out!

(By the way, there are huge differences between engineering fields, and industrial engineering is probably the most different from any other. If you want a real feel for whether you want to be an engineer, see if your university offers an Intro to Engineering course. At my school, it was a one credit class, and we visited a different department each week - mechanical, aerospace, chemical, computer, industrial, etc. That was a big help for me to decide to study engineering, and aerospace in particular. Good luck!)
References :

Gary H Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 12:58 pm

Best would be to ask the prof. Short of that, think about the steps involved in a customer finding and acquiring something they want. Consider what has to happen in order for a customer to get service from a store. For example… Customer has a need, customer may or may not understand enough to identify exactly what they need, store may or may not have exactly what the customer needs, if the store does not have exactly what the customer needs, does the store have something that is close? even if the store has exactly the right thing, will the customer be able to find it?

Consider what differences you can identify between a grocery store and a gas station or a book store and a lumber yard or a MacDonalds and fancy resturant.

Engineering is often dealing with systems and there are lots of different ways to think about systems. Almost anything humans do can be thought of as a process with process steps and each step having inputs and outputs. Some inputs are controllable, some are noise, and some are SOPs (std operating procedure or something on paper). Some outputs are desirable, some are not.

Good luck
References :

Shade Says:
October 14th, 2009 at 1:25 pm

Industrial Engineering is all about handling of materials and people and optimising those in order to do everything in the most cost effective way in terms of resources. (ie time and money).

You can look at shop floor layout, with regards to function and look at whether there is a person to help the customer make a choice or if everything is labeled in such a way to facilitate him helping himself. Then you can look at information leaflets or a help desk and then see how helpful it is to make a choice. You can then look at the ease of movement in the store or the amount of people behind the counter.

I would pick four different retail stores like a service outlet like salon, a luxury goods store like an art or antiques shop a Toy store and a grocery store.

The salon would have a receptionist waiting area wash up area and then cutting. They would place these so that the customer is as comfortable as possible and can move easily from one to the other. You could see how well they hold to a schedule and how many client they can see per day. They also need to analyse the needs of the customers as some procedures take longer. You can then compare the route through each store and the amount of people per day.

First though I would look at the headings of all the chapters in my text book and scan through it. Then you can use that as a measure on how to group the information and also it will give some basic outputs that is used. Like optimum number of staff to service customers in a given time all hours of the day.
References :

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