Management Engineering: A New Perspective on the Integration of Engineering and Management Knowledge

Engineering management has been historically focused on integrating scientific, engineering, and management know-how to contribute effectively to the functioning of organizations and industries. Today, an array of disruptive socio-technological transformations is bringing new challenges for education and research institutions engaged to advance the knowledge needed to design more performing socio-technical systems. Framed within the larger industrial engineering domain, management engineering has emerged as a new perspective to integrate technological and managerial knowledge, although a shared understanding of the field is yet to be introduced. In particular, the meaning and building blocks of management engineering can be discussed in the light of the evolving nature of engineering management. This article presents an extensive work of search and analysis of academic and practitioner evidence about management engineering, which allowed to derive a taxonomy of 467 concepts and 32 aggregating topics. The proposed framework can support academic discussion on the relevance of integrating management and engineering knowledge in the current socio-technical scenario. For practitioners, the identification of management engineering topics can be used to design global education initiatives as well as competence development and professional certification processes.