IE Capstone Design Course with IE and ME Team Collaboration

This paper presents an overview of the capstone design course in Industrial Engineering at Mississippi State University, a required course for the Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. In the course, students are formed into project teams, each of which selects one manufactured product to analyze as part of a comprehensive venture analysis. The unusual aspect of this course, and the focus of this paper, is the collaborations between the Design of Industrial Systems course and three other courses, including one outside the Department of Industrial Engineering. The collaborative courses are the two required Industrial Engineering courses of Manufacturing Processes and Engineering Administration, plus Mechanical Systems Design, a required capstone design course in the Mechanical Engineering curriculum. The courses that collaborate with Design of Industrial Systems act as subcontractors. The collaboration with Mechanical Engineering demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of crossdiscipline teamwork, one of five undergraduate enhancement areas adopted by the College of Engineering in 1997. These areas are communication skills, global awareness, computing skills, entrepreneurial thinking, and cross-discipline teamwork. Each collaboration is reviewed, with experiences gained and future plans presented.