In 1921, a group of people who had worked in industry during the First World War, running manufactures, gathered together to form a Production Engineering professional society, realising from their experiences during that war that manufacturing was inefficient and needed professional development, recognition and support. The Society's journal, The Production Engineer, dealt with technical developments and applications, but its coverage of management and related aspects did not present production as a coherent body of knowledge. In about 1950, the Department of Production Engineering was founded in the Birmingham University, and was headed by Norman Dudley from 1955. His aim for the Department was to create studies of the whole field of production, requiring not only the technical/engineering part but the financial, organisational and people contributions to manufacture, all of which interacted to run as an integrated system.
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