Building the Design Competence in Industrial Engineering Junior Students Through Realistic Constraints of the Operations and Logistics Laboratory

This paper provides a laboratory development experience through a product design project with junior students of the Industrial Engineering (IE) program in Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia. In the course “Productive Systems Design” (PSD) the students had the opportunity to develop their final project according to the needs of the Operations and Logistics lab, which serves around 6 courses of the IE department. Students were introduced to a challenge: to design a product with its manufacturing process that will be used in the assembly line provided by the lab, and to evaluate its potential impact into the upcoming lab experiences across the curriculum. The experience allowed the students to design a product that could be assembled in a lab which emulates a real environment. The projects complied with realistic constraints of capacity, time, inventory, cost, dimensions, number of work stations, line balance, and environmental, social, and safety constraints. The experience also involved the faculty members that teach different IE labs courses who played the role as clients and evaluators of the projects. The initial results from the experience with the students are promising. Despite the fact that the students faced a big challenge to accomplish the requirements, the results showed that the students performed better in providing a design solution by using the engineering design method. It was possible to satisfy the needs of the potential clients and to validate the requirements. In addition, involving junior students in the development of their own future lab experiences, improved their engagement with the program, motivation to their future professional development, and enabled the development of ABET professional skills such as “ability to design a system, component, or process...” and “ability to function on multidisciplinary teams”.