Problem Solving And Project Planning Based Curricular Enhancement In Manufacturing Engineering Technology Education

The “lean” trend in business and industry is to expand capacity and quality while decreasing overall costs through continuous problem solving. More problems to solve, with fewer staff, places a premium on employees with problem solving skills. Universities excel at teaching technical topics and how to solve textbook problems within each technical discipline. However, little effort is directed to methods of problem solving for problems outside the textbook, even though this is becoming a major occupation of engineers in industry. Therefore it is important for engineering and technical programs to include more problem solving and project planning and management components in the curriculum. There are experts on structured methods of problem solving, some with extensive industry experience. These professionals can easily prove that a structured process will yield better solutions to problems than an off-the-wall approach, and that anyone’s problem solving skills can be improved. Similarly, most engineers spend much of their time involved in projects, but few have been trained in project planning and management by actually doing projects. Structured problem solving and project management are both skills that are learned more by actual practice than by textbook study. So it is necessary to incorporate significant project practice using both skills into curriculum as a part of normal course work. This paper will discuss the strategies and processes of curriculum enhancement for our manufacturing program, and investigate and integrate more practical industry-related components into the manufacturing curriculum.