This is a collection of tools that I try to keep up to date with regarding industrial engineering, scientific research, operations research, programming and general productivity.

Knowledge Management

• Notion - “Notion is a note-taking software platform designed to help members of companies or organizations manage their knowledge for greater efficiency and productivity.”

Research Management

• Zotero - “Zotero is a free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF files.”
• Overleaf - “Overleaf is a collaborative cloud-based LaTeX editor used for writing, editing and publishing scientific documents.”

Industrial Engineering

From Wikipedia: “Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information and equipment.”

The field uses a collection of tools and methods to develop these optimization strategies, and lean manufacturing is at the forefront of our profession. Throughout the years, lean thinking was applied to the service industry, liberating a multitude of hidden efficiencies and productivity throughout most if not all industries: healthcare, airlines, auctions houses, sporting events, marketing and advertisement, workforce management etc…

Here is a collection of methods for process improvement that I’ve used throughout the years to enable such benefits:

Lean Thinking

Toyota was one of the first company to fully integrate the “lean approach” to their operations and it can be summarized as follows. (It is important to know that this was written with a manufacturing context in mind, but is fully transferable to the service industry):

1. All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing, and outcome.
2. Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and there must be an unambiguous yes or no way to send requests and receive responses.
3. The pathway for every product and service must be simple and direct.
4. Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization.

The key principles of the lean process can be described as:

1. The Value Stream: Identify the value stream for each product providing that value and challenge all of the wasted steps (generally nine out of ten) currently necessary to provide it
2. Flow: Make the product flow continuously through the remaining value-added steps
3. Pull: Introduce pull between all steps where continuous flow is possible
4. Perfection: Manage toward perfection so that the number of steps and the amount of time and information needed to serve the customer continually falls

Some popular methods that are applicable to the manufacturing and service industry would be:

• One piece flow
• The 8 MUDAs
• Kaizen
• VSM
• Setup reduction
• Push vs Pull

Some simple tools that can be used to visualize processes and interactions among people, systems and information

• Visio
• VSM

Operations Research

OR is a subfield of computer science, business analytics, industrial engineering and economics. It is a powerful mathematical method that helps model the interaction between people, systems and information in order to help optimize certain decisions in order to attain the best outcome possible.

I have created a list of common problems that can be solved with OR, along with a few modelling tricks that can save many hours of research.

Website Management

• Netlify - “Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites
• Forestry - “Content management system for sites built with static site generators.”

General Programming

• Github - “GitHub, Inc. is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project”

• VS Code - “Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git.”

• Python - “Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured, object-oriented and functional programming.”

  Some useful libraries I’ve used:

  • Google OR-Tools - “OR-Tools is an open source software suite for optimization, tuned for tackling the world’s toughest problems in vehicle routing, flows, integer and linear programming, and constraint programming.”
  • Pandas - “pandas is a fast, powerful, flexible and easy to use open source data analysis and manipulation tool, built on top of the Python programming language.”
  • Numpy - “NumPy is a library for the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large collection of high-level mathematical functions to operate on these arrays.”

Prototyping

• Airtable - “Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet.”
• Appsmith - “Appsmith is an open-source platform to build, deploy, and maintain internal apps. You can build anything from simple CRUD apps, admin panels, dashboards to custom business apps and complicated multi-step workflows.”
• Google Cloud Functions - “Cloud Functions has a simple and intuitive developer experience. Just write your code and let Google Cloud handle the operational infrastructure. Develop faster by writing and running small code snippets that respond to events. Streamline challenging orchestration problems by connecting Google Cloud products to one another or third party services using events.”