Large Engineering Company Research Articles

Proposal For Supply Chain Concentration In The Traditional MBA Program

The purpose of this proposal is to develop and implement a concentration in Supply Chain Management in the existing traditional MBA program effective fall 2012. Houston is the hub for many multinational oil and energy companies, large healthcare systems, wholesale/retail businesses, engineering and construction companies, and is a major city along the transportation artery of NAFTA. The program is designed to provide SCM expertise to students in the existing traditional MBA program. The environment for this proposal is the School of Business at Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas 77004.

10.2.1 A Framework to Institutionalize Systems Engineering Skill‐Set

AbstractSystems Engineering (SE) has been variously defined as an approach, discipline, process, practice, or similar other terms. Each of these terms presents issues especially when compared to other traditional engineering specializations. It is best to think of SE as a skill‐set that can be promoted among the engineering population in general but, more importantly, in a smaller group whose members lead multidisciplinary groups (e.g. chief engineers). A specific skill‐set is derived from INCOSE and NASA competency models using a design structure matrix type approach. This framework uses commonly understood terms in the industry to encourage adoption by a company's engineering leadership. It is recommended that large engineering companies encourage the SE skill‐set by including key SE experts in technical career ladders. The formation of an SE tools and methods group is also recommended that can drive and harmonize SE practice in all technical areas of a large engineering company.

Multiple criteria inventory classification using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Article history: Received 1 July 2011 Received in revised form September, 30, 2011 Accepted 30 September 2011 Available online 30 September 2011 A systematic approach to the inventory control and classification may have a significant influence on company competitiveness. In practice, all inventories cannot be controlled with equal attention. In order to efficiently control the inventory items and to determine the suitable ordering policies for them, multi-criteria inventory classification is used. In this paper, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process for multiple criteria ABC inventory classification has been proposed. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy process (Fuzzy AHP) is used to determine the relative weights of the attributes or criteria, and to classify inventories into different categories. To accredit the proposed model, it is implemented for the 351 raw materials of switch gear section of Energypac Engineering Limited (EEL), a large power engineering company of Bangladesh. In this approach, at first, related criteria have been selected (Unit price, last year consumption or annual demand, last use date, supplier, criticality, durability) and the weights of these criteria was determined using Fuzzy AHP. Then a score to each item was assigned for each criterion as triangular fuzzy number and the final normalized weighted score of each item using fuzzy set theory is calculate. Finally, Chang’s extent analysis was used for the comparison of fuzzy numbers and the final scores are compared with each other. Then all items were classified into three classes according to their final score. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Mapping Career Anchors in a Large Engineering Company: A Study

People will not accept uncertainty regardless of their status and make their own efforts to structure and interpret the meaning of their commonplace experience of the world. And in the organizational context this experience is what has been classified as careers. Of late, there has been a considerable interest generated in organizations about career planning and management. This study is an attempt to capture and give meaning to this exercise of managing and planning of careers and garner more currency to its application in the development of workforce. This career anchor study reveals the presence of rich and varied anchors in the company and speaks more of the organization for providing avenues for the development of the anchors over the years.

What complexity assessments can tell us about projects: dialogue between conception and perception

Complexity is an eminent concept in the project management community. This paper explores the value of complexity assessment to evaluate key management challenges of projects. It compares and contrasts the results of complexity assessments with rich qualitative data about projects through a multi-case study conducted with seven projects in a large plant engineering company. The results suggest that, if used with caution, complexity assessment can uncover significant challenges of projects. It also showed that complexities are partly inherent and partly (self-) induced, and therefore managers and companies should consider complexity not as given but as negotiable, and actively engage on the shaping of complexity throughout the project. The assessment of complexity itself is a tool to enable such active management.

From a sapling to the forest: the saga of the development of HRD in India

This is an account of the growth and development of HRD function in India. What started in the mid-1970s as a conceptualization of an integrated HRD system to change the performance appraisal systems in a large engineering company, resulted in the establishment of HRD departments in many firms. Further dissemination and perseverance resulted in the establishment of a centre for HRD, and subsequently the birth of a professional body and, later, an academic institution. The authors describe the growth in eight stages and conclude the path for future is in moving towards national HR policies and other social sectors.

Balancing Global Project Resources Utilising a Genetic Algorithm Approach with Stochastic Resource Assignments

Globalisation in large engineering, procurement and construction companies has lead in many cases to the establishment of a number of global centres for activities such as process design, detail design, procurement and fabrication. A company with a number of such resources then faces the problem of maintaining a high percentage utilisation in each of these resource locations, multiple projects need to be processed through each of these offices and which project is handled by which office is generally more reliant on available capacity than geography, particularly in the case of engineering centres. This paper considers this problem as an extension of the well studied Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) and utilises a modified form of our existing genetic algorithm to optimise the utilisation of multiple resource locations when scheduling multiple projects. The unique aspect of this genetic algorithm implementation is its use of stochastic resource assignments to simulate the assignment of certain of the project activities to different global facilities. The stochastic resource assignment is processed as an extension to the main chromosome and is therefore optimised along with the scheduling sequence.

The Impact of Rest Breaks on Temporal Trends in Injury Risk

This study examined the impact of rest breaks on temporal trends in industrial accident risks in an attempt to replicate earlier findings of a linear increase in risk as a function of elapsed time on task. In two separate studies, the trend in work‐related injuries were studied in relation to the timing of rest breaks. In study one, comparisons were made between on‐ and off‐track workers on weekly rotating three‐shift systems operating in a large engineering company. Records of on‐duty injuries that occurred over 12 months were examined (N=4645 incidents). Study two involved interviewing patients who had suffered work‐related hand injuries in a variety of occupational settings (N=407 patients). Hierarchical log linear analysis was used in both studies. In study one, risk increased from the first to the second half‐hour of continuous work following a break, but then remained relatively constant in subsequent half‐hour periods, although there was a fall in the third half‐hour for on‐track workers. In some of the data, there was also a decrease in risk in the period leading up to the end of a work period. There was a sharp decline in reported injuries toward the very end of a shift, but otherwise the observed trends did not differ between successive periods of continuous work or between morning, afternoon, and night shifts. In study two, risk increased from the first to the second half‐hour of continuous work and then remained relatively constant in the third half‐hour. The contrast between the current and previous findings may be due to the relatively unique work environment of the previous study. It is suggested that the current trends reflect the effects of working in a relatively unconstrained task environment, and that causes other than fatigue may underlie the trends observed in both the previous and current studies.

Welding station condition monitoring using bluetooth enabled sensors and intelligent data management

This paper reports on the first phase deployment of bluetooth enabled condition monitoring systems at a large multinational engineering company. The radio networking of sensor signals is a fast developing area and the facilities afforded by the Wisnet device were used in the monitoring of a welding station. This and any of the planned further monitoring systems had to comply to a carefully managed IT information plan at the company. For the example application, the development and testing of microcontoller-based pre-processing of data is reported. This includes further development of the Petri Net approach to provide event-based monitoring as a sensible alternative to the continuous transmission of the sensory data.

Through the eyes of an insider: Case study of an MNC subsidiary in an emerging economy

The government of India, during the late 1960s, was exerting pressure on multinational corporations throughout the country to tailor their activities to suit domestic needs. During this period, most foreign oil companies, such as Burmah Shell, Mobil, Caltex, Balmer-Lawrie, and a few large foreign engineering companies, such as Jessop, Bird, Braithwaite, Richardson & Cruddas, were all nationalized in phases. The government then imposed lots of restrictions on many industries importing goods, and levied higher import duties on a few selected items. These actions were taken by the government to justify the development of local industries, and to generate more domestic employment for large numbers of unemployed, though educated, youth. However, by the 1990s, the government of India had to come to terms with the activities of the World Trade Organization. All trade barriers and restrictions previously imposed had to be removed to allow much needed foreign exchange for the development of the economy to be raised. This meant more business opportunities for some of the multinationals that had been closely observing government policy changes.

Rest breaks and accident risk

Regular rest breaks are recommended to prevent accumulation of accident risk during sustained activities. We examined the effect of rest breaks on temporal trends in industrial accident risk, by assessment of accident records from a large engineering company, obtained over 3 years. In 2 h of continuous work, relative risk of an accident in the last half-hour of a shift was 2.08 (95% CI 1.73-2.43) higher than in the first half-hour. Trends in risk did not seem to differ between three 2-h work periods. Regular rest breaks seem to be an effective way to control accumulation of risk during industrial shift-work.

Application of coupled solver technology to CFD modeling of multiphase flows with CFX

Over the past ten years the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in chemical engineering has increased at a significant rate. Most of the large chemical engineering companies now use CFD daily in their design process, in problem solving and in improving performance of plants and equipment. The complexity of the problems tackled by CFD is increasing dramatically as the CFD technology advances and is delivered to users in an accessible and user friendly format. Multiphase flows are involved in almost all of the processes in chemical engineering, for examples: gas bubbles in liquid columns, solid particles in mixing vessels, liquid droplets in spray dryers. Multiphase flow problems are inherently very complex. Many of the physical processes (heat, mass and momentum) are linked and coupled between the phases. Despite the difficulties, many successful CFD calculations have been reported in the literature. In most of the current CFD algorithms for multiphase flows such as Spalding's IPSA method, a segregated solution method is used. The momentum, continuity and other equations are solved in separate steps. The whole calculation sequence must be iterated many times (typically thousands of iterations) for the solution to address all the coupling tenns properly and converge to the final solution. For single-phase flows, convergence speed can be improved by using what is known as a coupled solver technology. Within this technique the governing transport equations are all solved simultaneously. This strategy has been implemented in CFX-5 to model two-phase flows. In this paper we will describe the coupled solver technology implemented in the CFX-5 software and examine the advances of this technology in tenns of CFD performance on a real twophase example with published experimental data.

Emotional labour in corporate change programmes

This paper addresses the effects of corporate changeprogrammes on the emotions and ultimately the performance of theso-called ‘middle managers’ within these organizations.Drawing on empirical data from a recent case study in a largeengineering company, the paper addresses the extent to whichHochschild's highly original writing on the commercialization ofhuman feeling (1983) and the concept of emotional labour is applicable to managers in today's organizations. Emotional labour is defined as: ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ requiring one ‘to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 1983: 7). The conclusion reached is that emotional labour appears to be a growing but much ignored phenomenon in organizations today, which is worthy of attention and further research by the HRD community.

Surveillance of occupational and work-related diseases between 1993 and 1996 in an engineering company.

There are established reporting schemes for some occupational and work-related illnesses but these schemes may underestimate the true incidence of such diseases. Not all cases may be referred to a participating physician and access to adequate diagnostic facilities are not always available. Collecting data directly from occupational health departments may overcome some problems related to under-reporting as they have good access to the entire working population within their company. The aim of this paper is to report the results from such a reporting scheme operated by a large multi-national engineering company during the period 1993-96. All UK sites of Lucas Industries (later LucasVarity) participated. A report form was completed by the occupational health department of each participating site each month. The report form gave abbreviated details of each case of occupational and work-related disease occurring at that site during the previous month. Forms were posted to a central office where the data was collated and analyzed. The incidence of respiratory diseases was broadly similar or slightly higher to that reported from other schemes. Musculoskeletal diseases were by far the most common category of disease reported. During a four year period of reporting the incidence of occupational and work-related diseases decreased overall by approximately 75%. As the reported incidence of respiratory disease was comparable with or slightly higher than that from other schemes, it appears that reporting schemes such as this can provide useful and accurate data. Musculoskeletal diseases are the most common type of disease attributed to work and should probably receive greater attention. The decrease in incidence seen in LucasVarity over time may reflect increased emphasis given to health and safety issues within the company during the reporting period.

Organizational prototyping

The usefulness of applications which support cooperative work depends in its very nature on the way the cooperative work practice is organised. At the same time, the adoption of new technology is difficult and complex because of the amount of people involved and their distribution in time and space. This paper explores the possibilities of addressing this adoption process in a more simplified, yet systematic way without losing the focus on the interdependencies which characterise cooperative work. The notion of adoption is discussed as a dual process of adapting both the computer support to the work and adapting the work to the computer. A method called organisational prototyping is presented which aims at facilitating this adoption process. A case illustrates how organisational prototyping was used in the adoption of a cooperative tool for managing projects within a large engineering company in Denmark.

Organisational Prototyping: Adopting CSCW Applications in Organisations

The usefulness of applications which support cooperative work depends in its very nature on the way the cooperative work practice is organised. At the same time, the adoption of new technology is difficult and complex because of the amount of people involved and their distribution in time and space. This paper explores the possibilities of addressing this adoption process in a more simplified, yet systematic way without losing the focus on the interdependencies which characterise cooperative work. The notion of adoption is discussed as a dual process of adapting both the computer support to the work and adapting the work to the computer. A method called organisational prototyping is presented which aims at facilitating this adoption process. A case illustrates how organisa- tional prototyping was used in the adoption of a cooperative tool for managing projects within a large engineering company in Denmark.

Can action research be made more rigorous in a positivist sense? The contribution of an iterative approach

How can action research be made more rigorous? We discuss in this paper action research, positivism and some major criticisms of action research by positivists. We then examine issues relating the conduct of IS research in organisations through multiple iterations in the action research cycle proposed by Susman and Evered. We argue that the progress through iterations allows the researcher to gradually broaden the research scope and in consequence add generality to the research findings. A brief illustrative case is provided with a study on groupware introduction in a large civil engineering company. In the light of this illustrative case we contend that effective application of the iterative approach to action research has the potential to bring research rigour up closer to standards acceptable by positivists and yet preserve the elements that characterise action research as such.

A case study of strategic engineering decision making using judgmental modeling and psychological profiling

This paper focuses on the role that judgmental modeling played in helping a large international engineering company plan its future production environment and also on how psychological profiling can help us to understand how different individuals within the decision-making team contribute to the overall decision. In this case study, two strategic decisions had to be made: which production process to use and which projects to allocate to the identified process. The decisions were complicated by the fact that different members of the management team were responsible for different elements of the decision. There was extensive interchange and negotiation between these various parties throughout the decision-making process, and for both decisions the use of judgmental modeling was found to have advantages in terms of structuring the decision process and in rank-ordering the potential outcomes. A comparison is made of the rank orders of the different potential outcomes before and after the use of judgmental modeling, and the psychological profiles of the individuals are used to provide further insights into how decision makers change their points of view over the life of the decision.

Conducting a packaging survey within an engineering company: An exercise in developing a first‐level auditing tool

AbstractAn auditing process using a simple semi‐quantitative screening questionnaire has been developed to assess the management of packaging within a large multinational engineering company. Although the criteria applied are specific to the management of packaging, the basic methodology for data collection and analysis could be applied to a variety of situations. The objective was to identify the current performance of the company regarding the management of packaging. The performance indicators selected included: design criteria, repair, reuse and recycling rates, packaging waste disposal options and waste minimization initiatives. The survey data were analysed to produce an overall packaging efficiency factor (PEF). The PEF assessment is based on an evaluation of the selection and use of transit, intrasite and suppliers' packaging, packaging waste management systems and the design and co‐ordination of packaging. Analysis of the survey data has enabled the identification of the opportunities for improvement and to prioritization of the action plans for each site. The survey also identified group‐wide trends; this information was used to define training and technical support requirements. This investigation represents the first phase of the packaging survey. It is now intended that a selection of the sites will be audited to validate the responses given in the questionnaires. The follow‐up programme includes a repetition of this questionnaire survey in two years time. Copyright © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Increased injuries on night shift

Concern over safety has resulted in legislation by, for example, the Commission of the European Union, to limit the number of hours worked at night. There is, however, no direct evidence that injuries are more frequent at night. We analysed all 4645 injury incidents reported for a year on a rotating three-shift system in a large engineering company where the a-priori accident risk appeared to be constant. The relative risk of sustaining an injury was 1·23 (95% Cl 1·14-1·31) higher on the night shift than on the morning shift, which showed the lowest incidence. The type of work (machine versus self-paced) affected the pattern and nature of injuries; for self-paced work the relative risk of more serious injury on the night shift compared with the morning shift was 1 82 (1·30-2·34).