Roles of MSIE graduates to support Thailand sustainable smart industry

Abstract

The way business run has changed in recent decades due to technology advancement, and it has become more explicit in many parts of the world that companies have been moving from stand-alone technology exploitation towards holistically integrated technology exploitation. Thailand's government has also foreseen the need for change from a production-based economy to a value-based economy and has encouraged the Thai industry to focus more on producing innovative products and services which require high potential and skilled knowledge workers. Consequently, their roles will never be the same. This paper presents findings on the expected roles of graduates with a Master degree in Industrial Engineering (MSIE) drawn from an industry survey on industry needs to attain Industry 4.0 conducted with companies based in Thailand and in three European countries participating in Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education project on Curriculum Development of Master’s Degree Program in Industrial Engineering for Thailand Sustainable Smart Industry (MSIE 4.0). From the survey results, top-three technologies for being competitive and areas of applications to attain industry 4.0 in the companies' perspective were identified. Roles of MSIE graduates were determined for individual potential applications generated from identified technology-application relationships. According to the findings, the graduates are expected in general to play an important role in effective utilization of big data and real-time data for better decision making on various industrial practical problems as well as for better responsiveness to customers. The same procedure can be applied in other disciplines for identifying the roles of their graduates.