Lean Division News

August 2009

IIE Operational Excellence Conference and Expo 2009

Oct. 26 - Oct. 29 - Hyatt Regency St. Louis Riverfront

Post-conference workshops Oct. 28 - 29

Only 68 days left to register!
In trying economic times, it is more important than ever to continue to build your skills, develop new products and stay on top of the latest developments in quality and operational excellence. This is the ideal conference to move your career and your organization upward and onward. St. Louis, with its towering monument to westward expansion in the U.S., the Gateway Arch, is the perfect backdrop to the conference.

Post-conference sessions offer skill-building and application-based workshops to make every minute you spend here even more worthwhile.

This conference is truly a stellar example of continuous knowledge sharing, optimal networking and real-world solutions. more information and registration

Student Poster Competition

For the third year, the Operational Excellence Conference and Expo is featuring a graduate student poster session. This will be dedicated time for you to share your research. Posters that relate to the conference theme "Operational Excellence" will be given preference in the review process.

Students and teams of students who wish to present a poster display must send the following information to Beth Cudney no later than Aug. 15.

A title and an abstract of less than 250 words of the proposed poster
E-mail address, phone number, and mailing address of primary presenter
The university, department, grant, course or student organization affiliation (as appropriate)
A letter of support from a faculty member or organization advisor associated with the project

Presenters will be supplied with a bulletin board and push pins. Approximately four feet by six feet of space is recommended for project displays. Posters should reflect the presenter's main points of work and should be clear.

Selected participants will be notified no later than Sept 1

The poster session is scheduled for October 26-27, 2009

Book Review: Applying Design for Six Sigma to Software and Hardware Systems

by Eric Maass and Patricia McNair

Applying Design for Six Sigma to Software and Hardware Systems provides a roadmap for product development. This book is applicable for products ranging from simple new product introductions to high tech products and systems involving software and hardware development.

Throughout each chapter, realistic examples are given to illustrate the application of each tool and the overall successful implementation of DFSS to systems, software, and hardware development projects. more

Paper: A Comparative Study of POLCA and Generic CONWIP Production Control Systems in Erratic Demand Conditions

by Ozgur Kabadurmus, Department of Industrial Engineering, Auburn Unviersity

Abstract: The design and analysis of Toyota production systems (namely Lean production) has received great attention of both academia and industry for over 20 years. As one of the most important elements of the lean production, the traditional Kanban production control system has been widely investigated. Kanban systems are mainly suitable for certain repetitive manufacturing environments with low demand variability and low product variation. In order to overcome this downside of Kanban, CONWIP(Spearman et al., 1990) and POLCA (Suri, 1998) were proposed as alternative systems. In this paper, the optimal settings of operating parameters for POLCA and Generic CONWIP systems are determined under different hypothetical scenarios. The performances of the two production control systtems are compared using simulation and the results are discussed in detail. The paper