Improving Quality In Introductory Industrial Engineering Through Case Studies And Communication

We describe an introductory course in industrial engineering that uses case studies, teamwork, public policy issues, and a focus on the communication demands on engineers to provide —at the beginning of a student’s career—a synthetic view of the role of industrial engineers in society. The course covers typical industrial engineering subdisciplines such as engineering economics, operations research, inventory control, logistics, route planning, and location analysis. Instead of surveying a list of topics, the course provides some basic background on financial decision making and then requires students to work in teams on public-policy oriented case studies. The case studies require students to apply technical tools in a “real-life” context, derived from actual consulting experience; to deal with the ethical, social, political, and communication issues inherent in real situations; and to communicate the results of their analyses to both managerial and technical audiences. The paper will describe the class, two cases, and the integration of the writing component; provide a sample syllabus; and present an evaluation showing improvements in communication, general understanding, and motivation for additional study in industrial engineering. Background and Summary The course we describe in this paper is the entry point into the Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) curriculum at the University of Michigan. Students are generally in their second year of study, but many students at other levels from other engineering disciplines also elect the class. The total enrollment is 130 to 180 per term. Traditionally, this course has provided a taste of the entire curriculum without obtaining any depth in any single area and followed standard lecture format with a single text and weekly homework assignments completed individually. While enrollment remained high, many students expressed dissatisfaction due to repetition of material in later classes and perceptions of low value added from the course. We decided to revise the course to address these shortcomings and also to expose students to the environment of a practicing industrial engineer and to improve students’ technical communication and team skills. We decided to change the class format to concentrate on a few industrial engineering skills and to use cases with analyses completed in teams. We found that the cases and teams were a valuable teaching aid and were preferred by students. We also believe they enhanced students’ understanding of core material and their technical writing skills. P ge 228.1 2 Outline of Course In teaching the course, we attempted to provide students with a feel for the sort of problems encountered, and the technical and communication skills required of an industrial engineer. Rather than provide a synopsis of the entire IOE curriculum, we decided to instead provide a sample of the types of problems industrial engineers face, and the techniques they use to solve them. To this end, the course was organized into two distinct sections. In the first section, we took a traditional lecture/homework approach, teaching the fundamentals of engineering economics, an area that we believe all engineers should have an understanding of. The second part of the course was devoted to the solution of four cases that were simplified versions of actual consulting work performed by one of the authors. Skills required to solve the cases were taught as needed. The students worked in teams of four or five to come up with solutions to the cases. Instead of a final exam, we gave three compounding midterm exams, thereby providing strong motivation for the students to assimilate the material throughout the course, not just at the end. A sample syllabus appears in Appendix A. In the first section of the course, students were required to attend lectures and complete individual homework assignments designed to familiarize them with the fundamentals of engineering economics. We began by introducing basic accounting concepts, so that students would have some appreciation of what accounting terminology and records actually mean. Then, the concept of the time value of money was introduced, and this led naturally to discounting and the calculation of present value. Exercises for this section of the course were derived from real data obtained from the world-wide-web to demonstrate to the students that the skills they were learning were in use, and useful. Methods for valuing simple projects involving the purchase of long-term assets were then explored, including a discussion of why simple-minded rules in widespread use such as the payback period method could lead to incorrect decisions. Finally, we introduced methods for selecting among projects when capital is limited, such as linear and integer programming formulations (which were solved using a spreadsheet solver). This provided a natural lead-in to the second part of the course. The second portion of the course was designed to give students experience in working within a team environment on cases. Because many of the students had little or no experience in working in teams, we first gave introductory lectures on working within a team, writing reports, and problem solving. We considered it impractical to attempt to have the students give presentations simply because of the sheer size of the class (160 students), and so we provided no instruction in that area. The first case required the students to code an algorithm to solve a well-structured problem. In particular, the students were required to use dynamic programming to schedule electricity generation given demand forecasts and cost information. Our goal was to give the teams a clearly defined yet complex problem that was too difficult to solve by hand and whose solution would provide a great deal of satisfaction. The second case involved aspects of engineering economics and location analysis, and the objective was less clear than in the first case. The teams were required to advise a major P ge 228.2 3 automotive producer on where to relocate its major facilities. The case included a political/social dimension and is discussed in more detail later in this paper. Our third case required students to schedule the games played in a professional soccer league in such a way that the schedule was fair to all teams, while minimizing the total distance traveled by the teams. This case introduced elements of scheduling problems and their solution via integer programming methods, and is also discussed in more depth later in this paper. Up to this point we had avoided the notion of uncertainty in the class. However, we felt that students needed to have an appreciation for the complexities that uncertainty introduces into decision making. Therefore, the last case required the students to determine the number of helicopters a hospital should maintain for the purposes of emergency transport through an application of queuing theory. This case also introduced ethical considerations: should the hospital maximize profits alone, or should it be more concerned with saving lives? Introduction to Teams and Report Writing Because many of the students had little or no experience in working within teams and writing reports, we devoted two lectures to an introduction to these skills that are so fundamental to the practice of industrial engineering. Teams We devoted one lecture to the issue of how to build, and work within a team. This area is traditionally neglected when students are asked to work on team projects, and this can lead to difficulties when students with no team skills are asked to work together. We first provided some examples of past students reactions to team work, both positive and negative. The quotes given to the class were very well received and were taken from Eaves (1996), a discussion of the lessons learned in teaching team-based courses at Stanford University. It would appear that warstories are very popular with students. We then moved on to a discussion of team management, with the goal of giving students (1) the ability to recognize difficulties (such as occur, for example, when one member is perceived by others to be contributing less than might be expected to the team effort), and (2) ideas on how to deal with difficulties identified. Report Writing Without some guidance on writing reports, it was unreasonable to expect the teams to be able to deliver polished, well-structured reports. Therefore, it was necessary to not only provide an example report to act as a guide, but to also explain why it is necessary to devote considerable effort to structuring the information that will appear in the report. Therefore, we spent one lecture going over examples of both well-written and poorly-written reports, pointing out the strong points and weaknesses of the examples, and abstracting to a set of guiding principles. In particular, we tried to impress upon the students the extremely limited time that senior managers will devote to reading (skimming!) reports, and the implications of this for report structure. We hoped to demonstrate the need for a foreword and summary, two or more paragraphs at the head of the report that summarize the problem, what the team did to address the problem, and the results of the team’s efforts. We also hoped to provide the students with a sense of what P ge 228.3 4 information should be presented in the body of a report, what information should appear in an appendix, and what information should be omitted altogether. Students were given an example report based on a Harvard case to act as a guide in writing their own reports. The students found this lecture very entertaining and extremely useful, judging by the comments we received afterwards. Two Example Cases We will now discuss two of the cases in more depth, to suggest the scope of the cases and the lessons we hoped students would learn from them.