Semester in Strategic Operations (SSO) (Formerly Semester in Manufacturing - SiM)
Key Features
Company Visits
Site visits give students a comprehensive view of the challenges and opportunities unique to different industry segments. Students walk the shop floor talking to line workers to see how classroom learning stacks up on the job. Then students sit down with middle- and upper-level managers and union representatives to hear about strategic problems—what's working and what's not.
Between 15 and 20 companies open doors to SSO students. Industry segments and representative companies in 2008 were:
hospitality- Marriott
- Kionix
- Corning
- Guardian
- GE
- Charter Steel
- Goldman Sachs
- Maines Paper & Food Service, Inc.
- Raymond Forklift
- Anheuser-Bush
- Welch Allyn
- Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Kaizen Event
Each April, students spend three days engaged in a Kaizen event at the Lord Corporation headquarters in Erie, Pennsylvania. Lord is a diversified technology company that manufactures and markets adhesive, coating, and motion-management technologies worldwide. During the event, teams of students work alongside Lord employees on a project of continuous improvement that is intended to spot and eliminate waste and further humanize the workplace. At the end, the teams present their results to upper management.
Topics have included:
- value stream mapping of manufacturing processes
- value stream mapping of administrative tasks, such as change-order requests and customer service
- set-up time reduction
Like nothing else, this experience bridges the gap between theory and practice, as students put to work what they've learned. They get involved in a particular operation and experience the effectiveness of Kaizen events, even those of short duration. A single step in a sequence suggested by a team a few years ago has already saved the company more than $ 5 million.
