PATIENTS NEED DOCTORS, DEFENDANT NEEDS A LAWYER, SPACE NEEDS AN ASTRONAUT, EVERYTHING ELSE NEEDS INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
Even though "PATIENTS needs DOCTOR, DEFENSE needs LAWYER, SPACE needs an astronaut, everything else needs industrial engineering." seems to be too pretentious, it is an insufficient statement for industrial engineering. Because an industrial engineer can work in almost any sector, they can support doctors, lawyers and astronauts to do their jobs better. In fact, a large number of industrial engineers are employed in hospitals, courthouses, and space and aviation related institutions such as NASA.
In these institutions, an industrial engineer can design processes to improve the efficiency of the organization and the satisfaction of the service industry and provider, as well as they can develop decision support systems to help doctors, lawyers, and astronauts to make better decisions. For example, they can perform various tasks in the health sector, ranging from analyzing the risk of epidemics and establishing control mechanisms, service and bed capacity planning (eg number of hospitals and places, number of doctors / nurses, number of beds, number of operating rooms, etc.), supply chain management, production and stock control. They can do this for a hospital that serves a small area, as well as for national and international institutions and organizations. Likewise, an industrial engineer can develop techniques to help determine the best time for organ transplantation and to better interpret X-rays. In the treatment of cancer, industrial engineers can use mathematical models to determine the beam angle and intensity, which will cause minimal damage to other organs but will cause the maximum effect in the cancer region. In robotic surgery and closed surgery, they can develop models for determining the shortest path to the relevant organ without damaging other organs.
In fact, all of the above-mentioned works related to the health sector are already carried out by industrial engineers or by people who have received similar training in different names. It is possible to give similar and unusual examples for other sectors. In order not to be misunderstood, we need to make the following statement and emphasis: we do not say, "Industrial Engineer does every job". Likewise, we do not say to the doctor, lawyer or any other expert, "We know your profession better than you do, we can do your job better". Of course, the doctor will perform the surgery and interpret the X-ray film. However, a good industrial engineer can help to develop methods or systems that will enable perform a better surgery or a better interpretation of the x-ray film. In doing so, they make use of the expertise of the doctor and the engineers of the company developing the relevant device.
References
[1] Brandeau, M.L., Sainfont, F., Pierskalla W.P. Operations Research and Healthcare: A Handbook of Methods and Applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York, 2005.
[2] Alves, C.J.S., Pardalos, P.M., Vicente, L.N. Optimization in Medicine, Springer, 2008.
[3] Yih, Y. Handbook of Healthcare Delivery Systems, CRC Press, 2011.