Concurrent education for manufacturing engineering

Concurrent engineering is the blending of different disciplines via design/build teams in order to design a product and design the process to manufacture the product at the same time. This same principle can be applied in the training of industrial mechanical and manufacturing engineers and technologists. Engineering education has traditionally separated manufacturing oriented topics according to their primary function such as processes, materials, production management, and taught them as separate entities which fails to acknowledge and exploit an inherent symbiosis. Students are well schooled in the basics but often lack the agility to synthesize and creatively modify production systems to reflect the ever changing demands of world class manufacturing. Manufacturing is a many faceted endeavor which combines art, science and empirical modification. Mathematics is taught by doing math; manufacturing engineering should be taught by doing manufacturing in a systems environment that confronts students with the type of problems they will be faced with as they attempt to compete in today's globally competitive environment. As manufacturing systems become more agile, engineering graduates need to keep pace. This paper discusses the concepts involved and gives several approaches with implementation examples.