The history of organization engineering in Spain

Abstract

Organization Engineering, more commonly referred to as Industrial Engineering in the English-speaking world, is a widespread discipline that covers fields from Economic Analysis to Production Management or Operational Research. Our objective with this paper is to describe the historical evolution of this discipline, star ting from the strive of the Industrial Revolution for efficiently planning and managing the new production means. We discuss the main cornerstones in this evolution, star ting with the works of F.W. Taylor, analyze the influence of World War II, which boosted the demand for increasingly complex models, algorithms and applications, and describe the current scenario for Organization Engineering and its main challenges for the future. The paper then turns to the Spanish context, where the academic development of the discipline is also analyzed, including mention of the different Engineering Schools where the corresponding fields were incorporated to their curriculum, and ending with the current scenario brought along at the European level by the Bologna agreement. The third and final par t of the paper explores the relation between Organization Engineering and Business Organization in Spain. These two areas of knowledge, the first one related to engineering and industrial concepts while the second one is more focused on economics and usually based on Economics Faculties, are often perceived as identical due to their similarities, but we comment on their differences, which are also representative of the differences between Industrial Engineering and Economics, in terms of contents, methodologies and scope.