Teaching Manufacturing Process Design as a Means for Competitive Advantage in Chemical Process Industries

While manufacturing engineering curricula rightly borrows from both industrial engineering and mechanical engineering curricula, there is an increasing awareness in education that manufacturing engineering should be taught as a distinguishable engineering design activity. Doing so recognizes the potential for manufacturing engineering to drive deep sources of competitive advantage in product development through manufacturing innovation. This paper provides details on a pedagogy used to educate chemical engineers, without a background in discrete part manufacturing, about a design-oriented approach to manufacturing process selection, in the context of a four-day educational workshop on advancing chemical process innovations to market. The engineers were taught this manufacturing process design method in the context of designing and innovating chemical reactor components. E-books, in-lab process demonstrations, and spreadsheet cost models were all used as pedagogical tools to teach the method through a sequence of lectures, tutorials/laboratories, and class exercises. Survey results show that the chemical engineering participants scored the segment on selecting manufacturing processes higher than any other innovation segment in the four-day workshop. In-laboratory process demonstrations were scored high suggesting value in exposing chemical engineers to physical manufacturing processes during the workshop.