[Iefac.list] Seeking to work with intersted IE faculty

[shahrukh.irani at hoerbiger.com]

Dear IE faculty:

I am currently an Adjunct Associate Professor, an affiliation for which I 
am grateful to the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at The 
Ohio State University.  In September 2013, I left OSU to take this job in 
industry after 22 years in academia.  Today, I see a huge opportunity and 
urgent need to develop a radically different IE curriculum, at least at 
the undergraduate level (possibly for MS students too who wish to take a 
job in industry).  This curriculum would rewrite the syllabi for the core 
IE courses, such as Methods Analysis, Facilities Planning, Production 
Control and Scheduling, etc.  The fundamental guiding principle to develop 
each course would be to teach the IE that was pioneered by Toyota aka 
Lean.  Lean is IE that industry accepts and would LIKE our undergraduates 
and MS students to know.  What Lean lacks is viable (aka implementable) OR 
and software tools to improve upon the pencil-and-paper Lean tools! 
Examples of this are: (i) A Mixed Integer Program for solving the Machine 
Loading Problem as part of a lecture on Theory Of Constraints or (ii) the 
(s,S) inventory model for a 2-bin kanban system.  Books like Factory 
Physics offer us a glimpse of what this new curriculum could be! 

Another key shortcoming of existing IE curricula is the limited industry 
experience that students get in their courses to connect classroom theory 
to practice. A company like mine is willing to help on that front.  Almost 
as soon as I joined here, I began to actively leverage co-curricular 
projects, capstone team projects, internships, independent study projects 
done by grad students seeking industry experience, etc. to at least fix 
some of our simpler problems.  Yes, there are some really hard problems 
that your Ph.D.'s would love to attack but funding is hard to come by. 
However, at the undergraduate and MS levels, we could do a lot so everyone 
wins!  Every project that we have done would yield a case study to prove 
that the methods and software used to apply the IE that was used actually 
worked and the resulting system/process was implemented.

Would any faculty be interested in a university-industry partnership to 
develop this curriculum?  Besides my own company, I am confident that I 
could bring a few more Houston companies to work with us. 

Please feel free to contact me.  My company, Hoerbiger Corporation of 
America, firmly believes in supporting the educational, research and 
outreach goals of IE departments.

Thank you.

Shahrukh

===================================
Dr. Shahrukh A. Irani
Director, Industrial Engineering Research
HOERBIGER Corporation of America, Inc.
1212 Milby Street
Houston, TX 77023
713-224-9015 ext. 2546
713-225-5418 (General Fax)
www.hoerbiger.com
===================================

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