What is Industrial Engineering?
Industrial engineering basically relates to the effective use of machines, material, energy, information and most importantly human resources during the production process. Indu strial engineering optimizes the complex systems and processes. It deals with integrating the social, mathematical and physical aspects of the production systems.
What does IE do?
IE department is responsible for development of floor layouts, organizational, personnel, time standards, incentive plans and wage rates to ensure better production quality and resource optimization. IE is involved in forecasting, scheduling, line balancing, inventory management, material requirement planning, work study, plant layout, etc. 
Industrial engineers negotiate with garment merchandisers, are involved in garment analysis, navigate PP meetings, provide their insights for determination of production targets, setting machine layouts, line setting, line balancing, get involved in production meetings, collect production data and produce production reports, analyze those reports and submit their analysis to factory management.
10 reasons why IE department is important
The IE department is crucial in the apparel production supply chain as it performs many job responsibilities and roles: 
- Analyzing all the new styles for assessing the product breakdown and line settings. And, evaluating the finalized style to find most economical CMT, and reduce the effective SMV of the garment, by simplifying the construction methods without affecting the approved appearance and quality of the garment
- Making the operation breakdown, line layouts, and determining the thread consumption for the styles
- Identifying the department wise manpower requirement and allocation to meet the planned schedules and cost brackets
- Coordinating with various departments to improve and streamline the production process as it goes
- Coordinating with the HR for training for multi-skilling and development of new manufacturing labor
- Auditing factory processes to ensure the planned layouts and OBs are being implemented accurately and effectively and monitoring labor compensation and incentive systems to keep them motivated
- Monitoring the line efficiencies to ensure bottlenecks are being taken care of as they emerge
- Working on new projects and machine & attachments procurements to advance the production techniques being used, and development and updating the labor sill matrix
- Working on method improvements using Method study, time study, capacity study, bundle management, and WIP analysis techniques
- Preparation and monitoring of line wise incentive & performance reports
Industrial Engineering process Flow