Is the managerial focus on ensuring the best resource utilisation (resource efficiency) or ensuring a swift and even flow of materials and information (flow efficiency)? Is it your experience that the company's layout, management principles, performance management (PM), continuous improvement (C/I) support this focus? Or do you face challenges when executing the daily production due to an inefficient PM and C/I setup? Perhaps the company is using visualisation boards (Kaizen boards) to promote the employees' engagement at the PM and C/I meetings, but is experiencing low employee involvement in the problem-solving process? Or are the data and information on the visualisation boards several days/weeks old and thus outdated? Maybe you are challenged by unbalanced production lines and bottlenecks? Or have a wish to digitalise the PM and C/I activities in order to provide for data-driven problem solving?

Does your company lack the resources to analyse the above challenges and identify solutions based on a solid understanding of production-related challenges? Production is to be understood in the broader sense – be it industrial production, surgery/medical treatment at a hospital, haircuts at the hairdresser's or university teaching. For that reason, we prefer to use the term operations. We have students who possess state-of-the-art knowledge within the field. During the course of the project, the students can design the layout, including elimination of bottlenecks and balancing the workload of the line, establish and optimise the PM and C/I setup and digitalise the processing of data and the visualisation of PM and C/I. If relevant, it will be possible to test and qualify potential solutions in one of our labs, for instance through modelling and simulation.

The objective is that, after the project, the student will be better equipped to identify, formulate, communicate and, if relevant, implement the proposed solution. The communication aims to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed solution as well as the financial and business-related consequences of completing the project.

What can the company expect from this project?

• Practice-oriented analyses and solution development: The student works with issues defined by the company with the purpose of developing realistic solutions to current production-related challenges in terms of layout, management principles, management systems at the shop floor level, line balancing and bottleneck issues.
• Result: Analysis and solutions in the form of a presentation and a report (and lab tests, if relevant).
• New colleagues: The company has the opportunity to find students for new projects as well as future employees.

What is required by the company?

• The company's perceived challenges and its desire to improve performance or uncover new opportunities form the basis for an operations project.
• Conduct of meetings with the student during the course of the project.
• Availability in terms of answering questions from the student by email or phone.