World Trends in the Engineering of the Technological and Human Resources of Manufacturing

Abstract

In the period from the beginning of organized manufacturing in the 1700s to the 1900s, increasing disparate departmentalization in the developing manufacturing companies resulted in a long-term evolutionary trend toward an increasingly splintered, “bits-and-pieces” type operational approach to manufacturing. Then in the 1950s, the “watershed” event of the advent of digital computer technology and its application to manufacturing offered tremendous promise and potential to enable the integration of those bits-and-pieces, and thus, through computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) to operate manufacturing as a system. This initiated a long-term technological trend toward realization of that promise and potential. However, as the technology to do that developed, it was discovered in the late 1980s that that technology would only live up to its full potential if the engineering of it was integrated with effective engineering of the human-resource factors associated with the utilization of the technology in the operation of the overall system of manufacturing in manufacturing companies (enterprises). This new socio-technological approach to the engineering and operation of manufacturing has resulted in a powerful new long-term trend -- one toward realistic and substantial accomplishment of total integration of both technological and human-resource factors in the engineering and operation of the overall system of manufacturing in manufacturing enterprises. A second consequence of this new approach to the engineering of manufacturing is a strong imperative for change in the programs of education of manufacturing engineers. As a result, the higher education of manufacturing professionals is now beginning to respond to that imperative.