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January 1, 2012

Dear visitor,
A hearty welcome to the website of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management (IE&M) at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The concept of "IE&M" was first conceived by the founding fathers of our faculty in the mid-1950s. The founders, a mixed group of industrial engineers and operations researchers, identified a need to educate engineers who would have basic management education in addition to engineering skills and knowhow. This new breed of engineers became a great success story in Israel and similar programs were later opened in various universities and colleges. The demand to IE&M graduates is constantly on the rise and their impact is felt across all economic and industrial sectors.

Like all other engineering disciplines, IE&M is a dynamic entity. New areas of interest frequently appear while mature areas that were exhaustively investigated gradually give way. Thus, in the 1960s the faculty was the first to introduce behavioral sciences into the IE&M curricula in order to emphasize the human aspects in any work environment. Then, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970 we were the first to introduce a heavy dose of economic courses into our program so as to ensure that our graduates would be able to evaluate the economic implications of their engineering designs. In the 1980s the faculty was the first to introduce information systems as a major component in IE&M education and in the late 1990s and throughout the first decade of the 21st century we were the first to focus on service science and service engineering as a complement to the historic emphasize on production and manufacturing.

We now face a new and exciting challenge. There is a growing realization that IE&M needs to expand its horizon and devote more attention towards educating future engineers who will be capable of conceptualizing, designing, planning, implementing and operating complex systems. Consequently, there are many voices that argue for dropping the "M" part in IE&M and replacing it with "S" (for "systems"). When IE&M was launched, there was a vacuum in management education in Israel.