SAIIE28 Day 3

Day 3 of the conference yet again delivered some fascinating topics and food for thought, as we by now expect.

Keynote address

Ing Beatriz Rodriques, the Dean of Industrial Engineering at the University Santo Tomas in Columbia, highlighted some of the innovation trends in the engineering industry and in Industrial Engineering programs in Columbia.

Health Systems and Innovation

Emma Kleynhans, Hilde Herman and M Bvuchete all addressed topics related to healthcare, including policies to support public medicine availability, technology platforms to support the healthcare industry and how big data and Demand-Driven Supply Chain Management can benefit the industry.

Approximately 8.5% of the GDP in South Africa is spent on the healthcare, yet we still provide poor public healthcare services to the 80% of the population that it caters for. Of our population, 12.7% are living with HIV.

Big data can greatly assist the healthcare industry to improve demand planning and inventory management, by focusing on data collection, data management and data utilisation.

Gamification and Learning Factories

The Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Stellenbosch established a Learning Factory (LF) in order to bridge the gap of skill shortage at a tertiary level. The reasoning behind this is to address the high cost and low performance of the education system, as well as address unemployment in the country.
Gamification teaches students business principles by allowing them to learn and discover through engagement, and not by providing the theory upfront. This leads to more in depth engagement in the relevant topic. Several games are played in the LF, such as the following:
M Henning developed a three-dimensional matrix to measure the learning success of the educational games at the LF. TFC showed the best success rate due to the longer period over which the game is played.

The face of the future factory

Theresa Hattingh and Dieter Hartmann from the University of Witwatersrand presented the principles behind, as they call it, the face of the future factory. This is a programme designed to revolutionise the way in which undergraduate engineers are trained and factory operators are developed. 

The problem statement that is addressed with this programme is twofold:
  1. Students don't always have exposure to all things technological that forms a basis for tertiary education, mainly due to the way they were raised and the influence of e.g. poverty
  2. The students are not prepared for the workplace when they leave university, when they have to move from academic knowledge to practical applications.
A group of roughly 30 of the worst performing second and third year students are placed in a Fast-moving consumer goods factory for a full year as operators, working alongside the other factory workers. After this year, they go back to university to complete their studies. 

This programme has been an enormous success, with the pass rate of these students improving by 40% when they return to their studies. The students became more responsible in this time and learned to manage their finances better, whilst in many instances still supporting their families. Not a single student left the programme during this year and all returned to complete their studies. 

And the best of all, whilst working in the factory for the year, these students collectively initiated improvement projects that saved the company R50 million. This is significant, especially if you consider that they were the worst performing students in their first or second year.

Retention of engineering students

During this talk H Steenkamp positioned the need to increase retention rates of engineering students at training institutions in South Africa. By increasing retention rates, more students will complete their studies and enter the marketplace, thereby increasing the number of engineers in the country.

Some of the techniques that have been applied to increase the retention rate at the University of Johannesburg include Lean, Six Sigma, Data mining, Machine learning, Qualify Function Deployment (QFD), Statistical Process Control (SPC), Total Quality Management (TQM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). The 20 Keys to Workplace Improvement also provided some techniques that can assist to improve retention.

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