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The COVID-19 pandemic that caused campuses and businesses to shut down last spring also derailed or altered summer internship plans for many industrial and systems engineering students. Yet three Georgia Tech ISE students found themselves on the front lines of pandemic response by helping to improve shipping processes for a company that makes and distributes medical scrubs.
By Keith Albertson
As the wave of the COVID-19 pandemic made its way across the United States, the University of Pittsburgh, like so many other schools, workplaces and businesses, made alternate operational plans. Senior Design Capstone Course students had to pivot to remote meetings with their teams as well as their clients. As part of adapting, the nine student teams were required to develop and document contingency plans.
By Mike Sherwin
As industrial engineers, we are problem-solvers expected to develop a wide range of skills to help improve processes and systems. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the problems require minimizing human intervention through process digitalization and automation.
By Kevin Jay Kaufman-Ortiz, Victoria Wang-Mora and Lourdes A. Medina
During the virtual IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2020 in November, I spoke about how the last 10 months have felt like 10 years, which is a result of the level of VUCA occurring today. The concept of VUCA – which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – was invented in the 1980s by the U.S. Army War College as a way to describe the state of the world following the Cold War. The level of VUCA occurring in 2020 is something we have never experienced before.
By Jim Tompkins
Perhaps it is time for an industrial engineering practitioner to recognize that productivity and quality of life must go hand in hand. The question that must be asked is: What are the signs that operational excellence has improved employee quality of life in an organization?
By Rupy Sawhney, Ninad Pradhan, Enrique Macias de Anda and Carla Arbogast