Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/905872
December 2017 | ISE Magazine 11 I am passionate about industrial and systems engineering because it teaches you the never-ending cycle of continuous improvement, it provides you the necessary skills to solve challenges in a systematic way, it shows you how to see the big picture of any process and most impor- tantly it helps you to make people's lives better. I'm grateful toward IISE because it has supported and deepened my interest toward my career. Pay it Forward — Make a Donation to the IISE Scholarship Fund The IISE Scholarship Fund recognizes industrial and systems engineering students' academic excellence and campus leadership. Last year, IISE awarded more than $50,000 in scholarships. Carlos Manuel Arrieta Schmid is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Tecnológico de Monterrey. He is the 2017-18 recipient of the Dwight D. Gardner Scholarship. Visit www.iise.org/PlannedGiving to make a donaƟon today. whose performance would be evalu- ated against labor standards. Rather than blindly laying blame on the employee, today's best practic- es harness that employee's common sense, process knowledge and natural bent toward doing good work – in the cause of process improvement. Industrial engineer Allan Mogensen, father of work simplification in the 1930s, offered one useful pathway. But today the very best way to bring the workforce to bear on system failures is for employees to be outfitted with marking pens or other simple devices on which to record everything that isn't right or is going wrong – and making sure the workers do so every shift, every day. Recording can consist of a tally mark on suitable media (white board, computer terminal) for repeats and in words for one-off problems. The accumulated data are a trove of pointers (e.g., on Paretos) as to what needs attention. The employees who are doing the recording become team members, along with IEs, for finding and mitigating root causes. You can find examples in my book Let's Fix It: Ov actur , even though it was published at the turn of the century. The "Good eats" article does refer to one very valid use of labor stan- dards: evaluating the labor content when costly new equipment options are under consideration. Other valid uses include decisions on a major make or buy, whether to outsource or insource, bids on an important contract and pricing of products in the catalog. Those situations, how- ever, are infrequent, and supportive analysis of labor standards should be by audit and not built into a database of standards. In sum, the labor force should be treated as an active element of process improvement and not as an abstract resource to be manipulated by after-the-fact measures of perfor- mance against standard times. Richard J. Schonberger Independent researcher/author/speaker Bellevue, Washington We'd love to hear from you. Send letters to the editor to Michael Hughes at mhughes@iise.org or be retro and mail them to his attention at 3577 Parkway Lane, Suite 200, Norcross, GA 30092. And join the discussion on IISE's social media sites by sharing your professional insights, questions, multimedia, kudos and more. Go to connect.IISE.org or www.iise.org/networking to get into the conversation. Share and discuss