INTERDISCIPLINARY INDUSTRY-UNIVERSITY COLLABORATION - LESSONS FROM ANOPERATIONS IMPROVEMENT PROJECT

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 scho ols of engineering and management at MIT to develop integrated process planning models. Project participants included production managers, s upervisors 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 cou ld reduce tube drawing effort by more than 20 percent by using decisio n support tools and improving the planning processes. It also generate d techniques to diagnose problems, new performance metrics, and softwa re for short-term and medium-term process planning, persuaded plant ma nagers to take a systems view of process planning, led to undergraduat e and graduate thesis research, provided examples for class room use, and highlighted the enablers and challenges in conducting industry-uni versity projects, particularly those dealing with supply-chain integra tion.