A National Symposium: 

  
Engineering to Improve the Operations of Manufacturing Enterprises

May 13, 2010

The University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, MI

Supported by the National Academy of Engineering

and the National Science Foundation

Why Attend: Leaders from government, industry and academic organizations will describe how Operations Engineering -- the creation and use of models and principles from operations research and human systems integration disciplines -- can help U.S. manufacturers succeed in the highly competitive global economy.  
   

The Issue: The U.S. continues to be the largest manufacturer of  products in the world. Although manufacturing remains its single largest employment sector, its contribution to the GDP has declined over 50% in the last 35 years. For this reason, manufacturing enterprises must have, and must use, operations engineering tools to assess and specify new manufacturing processes and technologies to assure that they:

• add real value to the customer
• minimize environmental impacts
• provide safe work conditions, and
• allow fast reconfiguration to meet market and supply chain uncertainties. 

Keynote Speakers include:

• Charles Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering
• Larry Burns, VP for Research and Strategic Planning at GM (ret.)
• Sharon Nunes, VP for Green Manufacturing at IBM
• General David Maddox (ret.)

Additional expert panelists will discuss how modeling and simulation methods can be used to improve the operations of U.S. manufacturing enterprises.