Assignment C-1

Engineering The Profession

Student name: Hani mobarak ALghamdi
Team: 1
ID Number: 1409833
Member: 5
Section: C5
25/October/15

Industrial Engineering
Abstract
This is the first assignment in IE201 course (Introduction to
Engineering Design-1) which is a research about a particular
engineering specialization. It is done in order to increase my
knowledge about engineering and its fields as well as to choose the
right major that I am going to take to be my future field of professional
work, which is industrial engineering. However, in this research I will
discuss and answer many questions about Industrial engineering that
will lights our minds and put us on the right track of creativity.
Complementing for that, here are some examples of these questions:
technical skills and personal skills, what kind of problems industrial
engineers face, what sort of companies hire industrial engineers, And
what does the job look like for industrial engineers.
In my opinion, we all have to realize the importance of this
assignment for every undergraduate student who wants to be enrolled
in Industrial engineering. Because it discusses a lot of issues related to
industrial engineering and gives them rich information about this field.
I believe that I am now educated and aware enough to select the major
which is suitable for me, have awareness about other fields of
engineering, learn how to research correctly, and to learn how to
deliver the information to the reader effectively.

Work

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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
Before I start writing about industrial engineering and its issues,
allow me to tell you the best definition of engineering in general
according to the great encyclopedia Wikipedia Engineering: is the
application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge in
order to invent, design, built, maintain, research, and improve
structures, devices, machines, systems, materials, and processes. It
may encompass using insights to conceive, model and scale an
appropriate solution to a problem or objective. The discipline of
engineering is extremely broad, and encompasses a range of more
specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis
on particular areas of technology and types of application. [1]
But in this assignment we are interested in Industrial
Engineering. Therefore we must know what does it means. So the
definition of industrial engineering according to Wikipedia Industrial
Engineering: is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of
complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development,
improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of
people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials,
analysis and synthesis, as well as the mathematical, physical and
social sciences together with the principles and methods of
engineering design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be
obtained from such systems or processes. [2]
Success in any job and excellence it needs two types of skills,
technical skills and personal skills. But first we need to know the
difference between them.
Complementing for that, Technical skills are those that you need to be
able to perform a particular job. These often vary depending on the
type of role you will be performing or the industry in which you will be
working in. They can usually be developed through studying and
training. Examples of technical skills include an accountancy diploma,
fluency in a foreign language, knowledge of a particular software or
experience in a particular industry sector. Personal skills on the other
hand are usually self-taught and self-developed. Unlike technical skills
they are not specific to an industry or job. As such they are becoming
increasingly valuable to all employers, regardless of the type of
industry they operate in, as it helps them to understand how you will fit
in with their working environment and how you will perform as one of
their employees. [3]
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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
In addition, there is one more important type of skills which is
social skills. I will be abbreviating to talk about this kind of skill by
defining it only, because it almost considered as a personal skill. So the
divination is Ability to communicate, persuade, and interact with other
members of the society, without undue conflict or disharmony. [4]
Complementing for that, I think that I found some of my
technical skills which are, complex problem solving, critical thinking, active
listening, negotiation and learning strategies. On the other hand, I found that my
social skills (personal skills) witch people said I am good at are,
communication skills, decision making skills, commitment and
accepting responsibility, time management skills, ability to work under
pressure and creativity and problem solving skills. And I think these
skills are what industrial engineering department looking for in their
students.

The kind of problems that industrial engineers deal

with
There are many problems facing Industrial engineers which I
could not mention in this assignment, but I will mention the most
popular and most frequently, it is simple to provide you a picture of the
diverse challenges that an Industrial Engineers faces: [5]
HUMAN-MACHINE INTERACTIONS
A large bank is redesigning its ATM facilities. Their interest is to
offer customers more services at the machine, but they want to do this
in a way that does not increase (and hopefully reduces) customer
inconvenience and confusion that typically results from poor
instructions, illegible message displays, etc. They want you to create a
single new design that is suitable for all of their branch facilities. Any
ideas? How would you measure whether or not one design is superior
to another?
PLANNING
The Housing Office at University of Nebraska has to deal with a
big problem every fall; how to make dormitory assignments so as to
leave everybody reasonably happy. (Of course, it may not be possible
for everybody to be actually happy with their roommate assignment
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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
so Housings true aim would probably be to at least minimize the
amount of misery created overall with the assignments.) Heres the
situation suppose
that for the fall semester a total of 1700 freshmen are planning to live
on campus and in a dorm. Each student has, as part of their enrollment
information, submitted a wish list regarding their preferences in
terms of a roommate. These include such things as non-smoking,
serious study habits, from Kansas, not from Kansas, likes jazz,
talkative, no pet snakes, etc. Some of these attributes may have higher
priorities than others so Housing may weigh them in some way. In any
event, what Housing would like to do is find a pairing of individuals
that, in some sense, maximizes total acceptability and for which there
is enough dorm space. For example, if two rooms are available for four
students, but one student is absolutely unacceptable to the other three
(under any circumstance) then two rooms will simply not suffice.
Nonetheless, how do you go about solving this problem? Does it get
easier or harder if, rather than pairs, Housing is looking for groups of
three (i.e., dorms with 3-person suites)?

LOGISTICS
Surplus grain is presently being stockpiled in various warehouses
throughout the country (100,000 tons are available in St. Paul; 150,000
tons in Kansas City; 95,000 tons in Denver, etc.). A substantial demand
for this grain exists all over Eastern Europe (at least 75,000 tons in
Sarajevo; at least 150,000 tons in the Ukraine; 120,000 tons in Poland
and so forth). The government has estimated the shipping cost, per ton
from each warehouse to each possible demand location. Assuming that
we have enough grain to satisfy the total demand, what is the
cheapest way to do the shipping? For example, maybe the amount
shipped to the Ukraine is satisfied by all of the surplus in St. Paul plus
50,000 tons from Kansas City while from the remaining tonnage in
Kansas City, 75,000 is shipped to Sarajevo while 25,000 tons are sent
to Poland, etc. Certainly, there are many possibilities; whats the best?
Suppose on the other hand that (sadly) we have less grain available
than is demanded. That is, some of the locations will have to go
without as much grain as they need (at least from that available in the
United States).How would you approach the problem now?
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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession

Typical project time duration

After I searched on the internet and asked many industrial
engineers from my relatives and my fathers friends besides engineers
from other disciplines, I have reached to a result that no one can
determine the exact time for projects not even the industrial engineer
himself until he knows the nature of the project. When that happens,
he will be able to follow a specific procedure to assume an
approximately time to finish it. We can divide this procedure into four
major steps:

Gather information: it relies on the size of the project

and the surroundings of that project.
Construes this information: this step relies mainly on
the proficiency of the engineer.
Examine the returns: this step requires a lot of effort to
finish it because it depends on the returns and it may has
more steps or another procedure to be achieved.
Stratify the returns: this relies on the amount of returns
in general.

Types of Companies that hire industrial

engineers:
If we actually want to start counting the type of
companies that hire industrial engineers, then I promise
you that we will be tired counting. Because the jobs
boundaries of this discipline have a lot of diversity, but I
will do my best to list some of them below:
Banks such as: Sabb Bank, Riyadh Bank and
[Picture_1]:Saudi
Alrajhi Bank.
Aramco company
Medical firms and pharmacies like: Al-nahdi
Company,
United Doctors Hospital and Nesma Medical Company.
Factories: and this includes all sorts of factories in Saudi Arabia.

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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
Oil, gas and petrochemicals companies such as: Aramco
[Picture_1], Sabic and Petro Rabigh.
Executive and Administrative Companies with all its
branches.
Moreover, industrial engineer is not restricted to work in private
sector only, but he also has a great chance to get hired in the
government sector without facing any troubles.

Industrial engineering salary:

The salary of industrial engineer differs from engineer to the
other depending on: his experience in this field, the previous positions
he occupied, and indeed the qualifications he has.
So, in this paragraph I will collect some statistics about industrial
engineering average salary in Saudi Arabia and make a comparison
between it and the average salaries in the biggest industrial countries
around the world.

Average salaries
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
20,000
10,000
0

Saudi Arabia

Unied States

Japan

Canada

[Figure_2]: average industrial engineering salaries in the biggest

industrial countries. [6][7]
As seen in [Figure_2] above, the figure shows that industrial
engineer in Japan occupies the forefront by receiving about 54,800 U.S
dollar and that is the highest salary between the other three countries.
On the other side, Canada has become just behind Japan with an
average salary of 48,950 U.S dollar. After that the United States and
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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
finally Saudi Arabia. But if we focused on these averages, we are going
to realize that the difference between Japan and Saudi Arabia is only
around 11 thousand U.S dollar and that is actually not a big number.

The number of industrial engineers:

This section in my assignment might be the hardest one I faced
to get any information about. I searched all over the internet and I also
asked some engineers but unfortunately I found nothing about the
number of engineers in KSA. So I had to write about U.S. and this all
what I found about, According to the U.S. department of labor, there
were 1,500,000 engineers from different fields of specialization. The
number of industrial engineers is about 201,000 represents about 14
percent of all engineers in U.S. [8]

Professional society for industrial engineering:

The professional society for industrial
engineering in Saudi Arabia is called Saudi
Society for Industrial Engineering and
Systems Engineering[picture_2]. The goals of
this
society [picture_2]: Saudi society of
system and industrial
include:
development of scientific
engineering
thought in the
field
of
Industrial
Engineering, provide scientific advice, and Provide training
opportunities for technical and rehabilitation of members of the
assembly. On the other side, the activities of this assembly contain:
encourage scientific researches, conduct scientific studies, and
exchange experiences and information in the areas of industrial
engineering. [9]

Job market outlook for industrial engineers:

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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
The job market outlook for industrial engineers makes them very
optimistic about getting hired after graduating because as we can see
in [Figure_1] below, the number of factories in Saudi Arabia are
undergoing in a terrific phase of evolution.

Number of factories in K.S.A

No. of Factories

7000
6000
5000
4000
6471
3000
3906
2000
3418
2234
1694
1000
1313
850
0 198

no. of factories

Years

[Figure_1]: Number of factories in Saudi Arabia. [10]

And we can notice that clearly by comparing between the initial
number of factories in 1974 (198 factory) and the last number in 2013
(6741 factory) and that is for sure an enormous difference in the
positive side.

Conclusions

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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession
Praise be to Allah who helped me to complete this assignment
C-1 about engineering the profession which is Industrial engineering. In
this assignment I wrote about many things. I wrote about the definition
and nature of the work. I also wrote about the kinds of problems that
industrial engineers deal with, some types of companies in which we
can work, about the salaries of industrial engineers in the work field,
the name of the profession society industrial engineers belong to and
the situation of the employment market. I learned better about the
profession of Industrial engineering which for me is the major that I
think of it during my first year in the university. I chose industrial
engineering because I wanted to work more with people than with
machines. I wanted to use my mathematical skills to do something
applicable in the real world. I learned about the most important thing
for me and for all of the students entering this major which is the
future jobs that we can find to get good salaries to live with and to
enjoy ourselves by the money that we will get and to build our future in
good manner, And had knowledge about the other engineering fields.
So, now I will work harder as much as I can to become a professional
engineer and graduate with an appropriate GPA so I can find a good
career wherever I go.

Acknowledgements:
After finishing this assignment, I want to thank a lot of people
who helped me in doing it and guided me to the right steps of making
it. I want to express my gratitude to my friends who took the IE201
course before me because they gave me a background information
about the assignment and how should I do it. I want to thank the
internet who helped me in researching some statistics and definitions. I
want to give a special thanks to Dr. Ghaffer Kiani who gave us this
assignment to let us know more about our specialization and helped us
to understand what the requirements of it. In one word, now I could say
that I am 100% sure that I chose the correct field of engineering which
is industrial engineering.

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Assignment C-1
Engineering The Profession

References:
[1]. Wikipedia, engineering, retrieved from
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering)
[2]. Wikipedia, industrial engineering, retrieved from
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_engineering)
[3]. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the difference between the hard and soft
skills, retrieved from (https://www.enterprisealive.ie/connect-withus/the-difference-between-hard-skills-and-soft-skills/)
[4]. Business Dictionary, social skills, retrieved from
(http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/social-skills.html)
[5]. Paul Savory (1-1-2005), Details and Description of Industrial
Engineering (pages 8-11), University of Nebraska Lincoln, retrieved
from (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/imsefacpub/33/?
utm_source=digitalcommons.unl.edu%2Fimsefacpub
%2F33&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages)
[6]. Pay scale, Industrial Engineer Salary, retrieved from
(http://www.payscale.com/research/SA/Job=Industrial_Engineer/Salary)
(http://www.payscale.com/research/CA/Job=Industrial_Engineer/Salary)
(http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Industrial_Engineer/Salary)
[7]. Career cross, Engineering Salaries in Japan, retrieved from
(https://www.careercross.com/en/421700_careercross.html)
[8]. University of Business and Technology, Bachelor studies, retrieved
from (http://www.bachelorstudies.com/Bachelor-of-Science-inIndustrial-Engineering/Saudi-Arabia/UBT/)
[9]. SSSIE (Saudi Society for Industrial Engineering and Systems
Engineering), Saudi Arabia, retrieved from
(http://prod.kau.edu.sa/vpprojects/newSSIE/index.html)
[10]. Saudi information, retrieved from
(http://www.saudinf.com/main/e522.htm)

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