Reducing waste, unethical?

Unethical issues affect all forms of engineering.  Unethical and engineering disasters are usually considered to be because of human factors, design flaws or extreme conditions. Because of the relationship an industrial engineer plays on the human factors side, ethical issues still plague industrial engineering field.

Challenger Explosion

When we examine ethical issues we discover that they are caused by a few things. Sometimes it’s caused because of an insufficient amount of testing and knowledge. Other times it’s caused by negligence and or errors in general. The biggest problem, and more often than not, is caused because of insufficient knowledge, lack of testing, or lying about the test results.

If we examine the most horrific disaster in the 80’s, the Challenger, we discover that the reason it occurred was because of the o-rings. The o-rings we designed to operate within a certain temperatures. However, at the time of the launch the o-rings were exposed to temperatures well below the designated operating range. This is a result of human error, carelessness, underestimation and insufficient testing. NASA engineers did preform test on the o-rings and people knew about the test results but chose to ignore it, at a deadly cost. This is still a problem today except we are choosing to cheat tests and ignore results in order to reduce production waste in a manufacturing setting.

Human factors engineers, a division of industrial engineering, still deals with testing and interpreting results every day. A lot of times, especially in today’s society, bosses want to produce more of a product at a cheaper manufacturing cost. This requires industrial engineers to preform tests and come up with ways to cut those costs using the test results. Cutting cost leads to cutting corners, the “do whatever it takes mentality” is crippling engineer’s and their ethical stances.

In general engineers are attacking the manufacturing world by reducing wastes and improving processes. The problem I see, is how much waste is too much waste? What I mean by that is we are trying to cut out so much waste to improve processes and testing that we are ignoring and cheating test results with products. What good is a waffle iron that can be made at half the cost but causes a lot of burns to the people using it because of the material we use? It’s worth nothing and unethical to produce a product that is not safe. Even if engineers did not know about an issue it is still unethical to produce objects that can harm the public.  What I see happening in today’s market and manufacturing facilities is that some businesses want to achieve a efficiency level at all costs, even if  it may be unethical. I think it’s time we take a step back and do a gut check on what's really important. What’s important is the safety of the public and the users who use these products. Cutting corners and cheating test results to come out in your favor or giving your products unfair advantages when testing them is unethical.

In conclusion, how much waste is to much? At what point is the product being undermined by reducing things that are considered a waste?  We need to look at the big picture and focus on producing products in an ethical way that that is also efficient. What I suggest is a standard for all businesses. Also, all businesses should have an ethical code and that code should be displayed in their mission statement, as well as presented in a way that all employees know that their company is being ethical. It also holds companies accountable, ignorance is not an excuse and too many times businesses get off easy because they "didn't know". Businesses want to make money, same with all of us, but at what cost do you want to make your money? Engineering ethics is a tough situation because being ethical can be costly. However, being unethical has proven to cost businesses more than just money but also their reputation.