Lecture Topics

This is an introductory course in industrial engineering, which includes basic concepts, backgrounds and history, research scope, and an overview of the main courses. The main contents are the historical development of industrial engineering, product and process design, work design and measurements, facility layout and material handling systems, ergonomics, quality management, management science, and operations research, applied probability and statistics, engineering economy, logistics/supply chain management, and information systems.

Management Information System has been recognized and developed as a key infrastructure for business corporations and organizations. According to the changes in the business environment and business models, it is absolutely necessary to make a successful evolution of management information systems. In this class, we study the types of evolution of management information systems as well as the future projections of those systems which must be flexible and need strategic adaptation. In addition, as a basic element for those management information systems, we will learn about the structure of DBMS(Database Management System) and the design methodology for it. 

In this class, we will study the related topics about the fundamental principles, criteria, and historical foundations of total quality in addition to the basic contents for understanding and applying technical tools and performance excellence from an enterprise perspective. Thus, the basic philosophy and fundamentals for quality management in modern industries will be provided. And then, we will study the statistical and optimization models for quantitative approaches to quality management. Finally, the business approaches in practice for enterprise-level management such as six sigma, and process improvements for building and sustaining quality would be studied. 

 Key topics which would be shared and discussed in this class would be the network configurations with inventory decisions for business logistics and even for the supply chain management. Basic structural configurations of supply chain networks should be studied in terms of end-to-end integration over the whole supply chain process. And then, the locations and quantities of supply chain inventory could be configured to maximize the effectiveness of the supply chain network as well as supply chain inventory. Some basic quantitative and mathematical models would be provided for optimizing the whole business logistics in the context of supply chain management.

In this course, we will learn about the following major issues which would be related to the design, implementation, and operations of global production systems, as well as engineering approaches to systematically address and solve these issues. 

1) Understanding the background of globalization of the production system 

2) Understanding of various decision issues for a global production system 

3) Learning about decision-making techniques for making reasonable investment decisions 

4) Learning about the types of network-based systems in global production systems 

5) Learning about production technology and supply chain operating system for global supply chain operation

In this course, our common objective would be to establish reasonable viewpoints which could be used for supply chain analysis, modeling, and design. Above all, it is absolutely necessary to understand the basic and core components and elements of a typical supply chain system. Thus, several key elements of a supply chain system would be introduced and shared in a class. It is strongly expected that all the students after this class would be confident and equipped with basic knowledge about the supply chain framework in terms of engineering perspectives.

The changing role of the purchasing process in a supply chain gets more important than ever before. It means that the success of a promising supply chain depends on the purchasing function or process since the range of this process(or function) has been expanded and extended in a modern supply chain process. In this course, we will study several key categories for designing and operating the purchasing process, i.e., analysis of purchasing function, strategy formation, and operational planning for it. In addition, an extensive survey of research articles would add more distinctive values to this course.