Engineering
Engineering is the creative application of science, mathematical methods, and empirical evidence to the innovation, design, construction, operation and maintenance of structures, machines, materials, devices, systems, processes, and organizations. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application. See glossary of engineering.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the production of merchandise for use or sale using labour and machines, tools, chemical and biological processing, or formulation. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished goods may be sold to other manufacturers for the production of other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances, furniture, sports equipment or automobiles, or sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to retailers, who then sell them to end users and consumers.
Systems Engineering
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking principles to organize this body of knowledge. Issues such as requirements engineering, reliability, logistics, coordination of different teams, testing and evaluation, maintainability and many other disciplines necessary for successful system development, design, implementation, and ultimate decommission become more difficult when dealing with large or complex projects. Systems engineering deals with work-processes, optimization methods, and risk management tools in such projects. It overlaps technical and human-centered disciplines such as industrial engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, control engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, cybernetics, organizational studies and project management. Systems engineering ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered, and integrated into a whole.
Systems Engineering
Chestnut (1965) devotes one page of the more than 600 pages in his book to man as an operator or an element of man-machine systems. Hall (1962) devotes about a page and a half to human factors applications. Machol (1965) has a brief chapter of limited content on human factors, in which man is considered only as an information processor. Shearer et al. (1967) mention a driver and a steersman in their introductory chapter; thereafter, there is no of man, his characteristics, or his behavior. Wilson (1965) allocates three pages to human factors. For every book on systems engineering containing a mention of the human operator, there is another in which the words human, man, human factors, and psychology do not appear.
Kenyon B. De Greene, Earl A. Alluisi (1970) Systems psychology. p. 75
Systems Engineering
Systems engineering is a highly technical pursuit and if a nontechnical man attempts to direct the systems engineering as such, it must end up in a waste of technical talent below.
Aeronautical Engineering Review (1957) Vol. 16. p. 43
Manufacturing
We went through one of the big automobile factories to-day.... The foundry interested me particularly. The heat was terrific. The men seemed weary. Here manual labour is a drudgery and toil is slavery. The men cannot possibly find any satisfaction in their work. They simply work to make a living. Their sweat and their dull pain are part of the price paid for the fine cars we all run. And most of us run the cars without knowing what price is being paid for them.... We are all responsible. We all want the things which the factory produces and none of us is sensitive enough to care how much in human values the efficiency of the modern factory costs.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic pp. 79–80