Sweeping changes are occurring in how goods and commodities are designed, produced, sold, and serviced. Product design is improving while product-development cycles, defect levels, and costs are being reduced—and the changes are often radical in nature and scale. The overall effect is a merging of design, manufacturing, marketing, and supply chain into a seamless whole. The main drivers for these changes are growing customer demand for higher quality and more diverse products, and fierce international competition.
Students who elect the Manufacturing Minor are introduced to areas of finance, operations management, personnel management, and manufacturing processes, and participate in a cross-disciplinary manufacturing-design project.
The cross-disciplinary group design project involves an industrial client. The project may address product design, the design or improvement of a manufacturing system, quality improvement, distribution, or other issues. Design teams meet with faculty members and interact regularly with their clients.
Required Courses
The Manufacturing Minor uses some of the elective freedom in the regular M.Eng. curriculum to provide a common core of manufacturing courses. The manufacturing core courses are:
Accounting and Financial Decision Making, NBA 5530
This course focuses on basic financial and managerial accounting, the economic and financial concepts that have a bearing on managerial decisions. The goals of the course are: (1) to give students a working knowledge of the accounting process and the value and limitations of the data that comes out of the accounting information system, (2) to familiarize students with key concepts in managerial accounting and the application of cost information to pricing and operating decisions, and (3) to promote an understanding of the use of economic theory in the evaluation of capital investment projects. The teaching methods consist of lectures and cases. Students are evaluated on the basis of exams.
Design of Manufacturing Systems I, ORIE 5100
Project course in which students, working in teams, design a manufacturing logistics system and conduct capacity, material flow, and cost analysis of their design. Meetings between project teams and faculty advisers are substituted for some lectures. Analytical methods for controlling inventories, planning production, and evaluating system performance are presented in lectures.
Design for Manufacture and Assembly, MAE 5140
Nominal DFMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly) and variational DFMA are covered in two parallel streams. The nominal stream is based on readings in a popular text that surveys the role of manufacturing and assembly processes in part and product design. The second stream, covered mainly through lectures, addresses dimensional variability and its control through parametric and geometric tolerances, dimensional metrology, and statistical quality and process control.
Manufacturing Option Design Project, ORIE 5910
A cross-disciplinary group design project centered on a major manufactured product, including the concurrent design of a system for the product’s manufacture. Market needs, economics, financing, quality, life-cycle costs, distribution, and marketing are addressed as part of the product and manufacturing-system design. Each project will involve an industrial partner.
Other Courses to Consider:
Supply Chain Management, ORIE 5126
A supply chain is the scope of activities that convert raw materials (e.g., wheat) to finished products delivered to the end consumer (e.g., a box of cereal at the local P&C), usually spanning several corporations. Supply chain management focuses on the flow of products, information, and money through the supply chain. An overview of issues, opportunities, tools, and approaches. Emphasis is on business processes, system dynamics, control, design, re-engineering. Covers the relationship between the supply chain and the company's strategic position relative to its clients and its competition. Considers dimensions of intercorporate relationships with partners, including decision-making, incentives, and risk.
Chemical, Polymer, Biomedical, and Electronic Materials, ChemE 5200
A survey class of chemical engineering topics, consisting of a number of one-credit modules. Open to non–chemical engineers only. The modules include Turbomachinery, Chemical Processing, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic Materials Processing, Polymer Processing, Chemical Engineering Processing Units and Equipment, and Petroleum Refining.
Project Management, CEE 5900
Core graduate course in project management for people who will manage technical or engineering projects. Focuses both on the technical tools of project management (e.g., methods for planning, scheduling, and control) and the human side (e.g., forming a project team, managing performance, resolving conflicts), with somewhat greater emphasis on the latter.
Introduction to Composite Materials, MAE 4550
Course topics include introduction to composite materials; varieties and properties of fiber reinforcements and matrix materials; micromechanics of stiffness and stress transfer in discontinuous fiber/matrix arrays; orthotropic elasticity as applied to parallel fibers in a matrix and lamina; theory of stiffness (tension, bending, torsion) and failure of laminates and composite plates, including computer software for design; and manufacturing methods and applications for composites. There is a group component design and manufacturing paper required, and a group laboratory on laminated component fabrication.
Students who already have coursework equivalent to ORIE 5300 and ORIE 5560 can finish the M.Eng. degree with the Manufacturing Option in two semesters plus the January intersession period, which is used for part of the group project work. Students who lack equivalent course work should either take these courses during the preceding summer, or spend two fall semesters and one spring semester at Cornell.