Management Engineering - Consulting

Consulting

As engineering firms are usually small partnerships, they cannot afford in-house management, therefore giving rise to the need for engineering management consultancy. It involves providing management consulting advice that is specific to engineering. Indifferent from the traditional focus of the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey, science and engineering requires a particularly holistic approach involving art and science. There are many branches of engineering management consultancy (commerce), including law, accounting, human resources, marketing, politics, economics, finance, public affairs, and communication. Commonly, engineering management consultants are also used when firms require special technical knowledge, though many prefer to use engineering educational consultants for such a task, to upgrade organizational knowledge and in able to keep the intellectual property confidential. Though many firms opt to use traditional management consulting firms, many lack the know-how to tailor the traditional theories to accommodate technical workers.

Engineering management consulting is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials and/or processes. Consultants strive to improve upon existing processes, products or systems. Engineering management consulting draws upon the principles and methods of engineering 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. Engineering management consulting puts a focus on the social impact of the product, process or system that is being analyzed.

Examples of where engineering management consulting might be used include designing an assembly workstation, strategizing for various operational logistics, consulting as an efficiency expert, developing a new financial algorithm or loan system for a bank, streamlining operation and emergency room location or usage in a hospital, planning complex distribution schemes for materials or products (referred to as Supply Chain Management), and shortening lines (or queues) at a bank, hospital, or a theme park. Management engineering consultants typically use computer simulation (especially discrete event simulation), along with extensive mathematical tools and modeling and computational methods for system analysis, evaluation, and optimization.