Interdisciplinary Industry-University Collaboration: Lessons from an Operations Improvement Project

Anantaram Balakrishnan, Stuart Brown, Duane Dunlap and Robert Pahl
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Anantaram Balakrishnan: Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Stuart Brown: Failure Analysis Associates, Framingham, Massachusetts 01701
Duane Dunlap: Alcoa Technical Center, Alcoa Center, Pennsylvania 15069
Robert Pahl: Alcoa Extrusion/Tube System, Lafayette, Indiana 47903

Interfaces, 1995, vol. 25, issue 5, 12-41

Abstract: A six-month Leaders-for-Manufacturing student internship at the Alcoa extrusion and tube plant in Lafayette, Indiana identified a promising operations improvement opportunity in tube manufacturing and led to a two-year collaboration between Alcoa and faculty members from the schools of engineering and management at MIT to develop integrated process planning models. Project participants included production managers, supervisors and planners at the plant, process engineers from the Alcoa Technical Center, and faculty and students in engineering, operations research, and management. The project demonstrated that the plant could reduce tube drawing effort by more than 20 percent by using decision support tools and improving the planning processes. It also generated techniques to diagnose problems, new performance metrics, and software for short-term and medium-term process planning, persuaded plant managers to take a systems view of process planning, led to undergraduate and graduate thesis research, provided examples for class room use, and highlighted the enablers and challenges in conducting industry-university projects, particularly those dealing with supply-chain integration.

Keywords: industries: mining/metals; production/scheduling: planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
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