Adding Lean And Six Sigma To Industrial Engineering Technology Programs: Does This Constitute A Change In Curriculum?

This paper will focus on changes that have been made to Industrial Engineering Technology (IET) and Industrial Technology (IT) programs to incorporate popularized ‘Lean Six Sigma’ terms into existing curriculum without making any drastic impacts to the topics taught within the programs. Included will be a discussion of how IET and IT faculty at Purdue University and its regional campuses have capitalized on Lean Six Sigma training for non-manufacturing industries to broaden their curriculum. By having faculty utilize their expertise in the non-manufacturing arena, they are able to translate experiences back into classroom discussions as well as document the experiences in other teaching materials. Additionally, new courses have been developed and alternate educational opportunities such as certificates at both undergraduate and graduate levels have been developed to meet this expanding need for IET and IT principles in nonmanufacturing industries under the guise of ‘Lean Six Sigma.’ Emerging opportunities such as these at various academic institutions will be discussed. Introduction The profession of Industrial Engineering has been evolving since its conception in the 1880’s when Frederick Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth first began to develop the rules and techniques of methods improvement. Since then the term Industrial Engineer has been associated with a variety of organizational functions and methodologies that stem from this one central concept of helping enterprises to drive down costs and improve organizational efficiency. Topics associated with this over the years have included quality, engineering economics, human factors, facility layout, scheduling, logistics, design and manufacturing of products, simulation, and most recently, Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. When we discuss the topics of Lean and Six Sigma we find that all of the core concepts are already being taught within most IET and IT programs as many educators will eagerly argue. This results in little curriculum changes required to incorporate these ‘new’ Industrial Engineering topics. Possibly a more important change to IET and IT curriculum that can capitalize on the natural incorporation of Lean and Six Sigma is addressing the issue that the practice of industrial engineering (which shares many of the same core concepts as IET and IT programs) has broadened beyond the traditional manufacturing setting to areas such as transportation, banking, retailing, lodging, healthcare, telecommunications, government, service and other non-manufacturing organizations. To potential students the name “industrial” can be a deterrent to pursuing this course of study and potential employers in service industries may be unaware of the usefulness of IET and IT graduates within their organizations. To this point, the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) reported findings from a study presented in the Engineering Workforce Commission newsletter that showed Industrial engineers would enjoy a 12.8 percent overall increase in jobs in 2008 compared to 1998 but this increase shows only modest increases in IE jobs among manufacturers (6.5 percent), while it projected a whopping 34.4 percent job growth in P ge 13151.3 non-manufacturing segments other than government. IET and IT graduates can therefore benefit from the Lean Six Sigma terminology change that is now prevalent across all industries. Healthcare providers, financial institutions and others know of Lean Six Sigma methods and can relate the benefits of using these methods within their particular organizations whereas they are often less apt to identify how an ‘industrial engineer’ may help them. Lean Six Sigma – A Historical Perspective The term Lean was introduced by Krafcik and the famous book, The Machine That Changed the World 3, . These publications present the results of a major MIT study to identify systematically best practices of Japanese and other automobile manufacturers worldwide. The techniques highlighted in these publications are techniques that have been taught (using some alternative terminology) in traditional IET and IT courses such as Facility Layout and Methods Improvement as well as many others. The focus of Lean is waste reduction for process improvement. Six Sigma was first started at Motorola, Inc. and was then developed into what we know today at General Electric. The main thrust of Six Sigma requires an organization to follow a prescribed process to reduce variation in order to improve customer satisfaction. It is a structured process that is designed to deliver almost perfect products or services on a consistent basis and improving bottom line performance by finding and eliminating the causes of defects in business processes. A wide range of companies have been successful in implementing the Six Sigma philosophy and various definitions have been proposed, but all contain the same central themes which, like Lean concepts, are found throughout most IET and IT Curriculum. Some of these themes include use of teams, training in “statistical thinking,” emphasis on a systematic problem solving method, and a management philosophy that focuses on supporting these initiatives as a business strategy. So the focus of Six Sigma can be summarized as a management philosophy whereby statistical methods are used to systematically reduce variation in processes. Both Lean and Six Sigma emerged as business improvement philosophies in the late 1980’s early 1990’s and at that time many practitioners were set on differentiating one methodology from the other. Today, most practitioners will agree that the two methodologies compliment one another and when the statistical approach is used in conjunction with waste elimination techniques, the improvement philosophy is more versatile and complete. Hence, today many publications refer to the philosophy as ‘Lean Six Sigma.’ Lean and Six Sigma get noticed in the Educational arena The question that therefore should be posed is: “Are universities changing their curriculum to include Lean and Six Sigma as a result of the latest workforce trends?” A decade ago, Lean and Six Sigma were just beginning to be recognized as potentially important terms in higher education in engineering and engineering technology programs. One reference that highlights this point well is the number of papers presented annually at the National American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conferences that mention the terms Lean or Six Sigma (See Table 1). In 1998 only eleven (11) academics P ge 13151.4 found the term Lean important enough to mention in their academic research papers and zero (0) mentioned Six Sigma. In 1999 nine (9) mentioned Lean and one (1) Six Sigma. The number of papers mentioning these terms were slow to increase for the next five years with a dramatic jump in interest showing in 2004 with thirty-seven (37) papers mentioning Lean and twenty-one (21) mentioning Six Sigma and by 2007 the topic had shown to be one of great interest with Lean showing up in sixty-three (63) papers and Six Sigma in thirty-two (32). With this type of interest, it would be expected that some changes may be seen in IET and IT curriculum themselves to highlight these ‘new found’ topics, however contrary to the surge in using these terms, research shows that relatively few programs have incorporated these terms into their curriculum. Number of ASEE national conference papers mentioning the terms Lean or Six Sigma 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 200