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This chapter describes what an industrial engineer does to help an organization design and improve the part of its production system that is made up of long lasting physical assets, including facilities, production equipment, information technology, and equipment for material handling and storage.

The IE must make four interrelated sets of decisions about these assets.

• 6.1 What type of physical assets does the organization need?
• 6.2 Where will the organization put these assets? This question must be answered on two levels:
  • Where in the world will the organization put the buildings to house these assets?
  • Where, within the organization’s buildings, will the organization put each asset?
• 6.3 How will the organization move and store physical items?
• 6.4 How will the organization move and store information?
• 6.5 How will the organization maintain its physical assets?

Again, I am pretending that these topics can be broken apart and considered separately, but they really can’t be.