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Session 2357

Tools for Early Discipline Integration of Industrial Engineering and Business Students

Paul Stanfield, Silvanus Udoka North Carolina A&T State University

1. Introduction

In practice, Industrial Engineers are often tasked with appropriately implementing developing technology within an organization’s business model. This integrating role requires interaction with technical specialists (engineers) and business management. Some universities are emulating this environment for teaching in the senior year through adoption of multidisciplinary senior design projects. Additionally, most industrial engineers have experience interacting with other engineers earlier in their academic career through common engineering courses. However, interaction with business students rarely occurs before the senior year, if then. This deficiency prevents the development of a key skill required for industrial engineering practice. This paper describes two innovative approaches to experientially teach multidisciplinary problem solving to teams of engineering and business students. Both approaches allow the interactions to occur earlier in the curriculum. The first approach is through class partnering. Such partnering emulates more long term interdisciplinary efforts such as design teams and configuration management teams. This approach involves the association of one business class with an industrial engineering class. Multidisciplinary teams work throughout the semester to solve a realistic problem associated with a single product or system, organized to culminate in a technical design and implementation appropriate for a given business model. This approach has already been tested using a product realization project involving student from two classes, an International Management class from the Department of Business Administration (School of Business and Economics), and the Computer Aided Design and Manufacture course from the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (College of Engineering). Best practices and likely challenges are listed. Based on challenges from the class partnering approach, a second approach is describe which uses the Active Learning In the Virtual Enterprise (ALIVE) system. This approach emulates shorter term interdisciplinary efforts common in Industrial Engineering practice. The Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a full scale manufacturing supply chain, integrated using information technology, and producing an actual product (desk clocks). Departmental laboratories are organized as business departments within the enterprise. ALIVE is a set of web-based learning modules, essentially short internships in different areas of the VE. ALIVE provides a practical and consistent means of developing realistic problem solving skills in engineering and business

Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education

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Udoka, S., & Stanfield, P. (2003, June), Tools For Early Curriculum Discipline Integration Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--12095