Hi,ENGINEERZ

Employment Prospects
With quality and productivity improvement now recognized as fundamental to achieving long-term success, today's business or organization requires people with state-of-the-art knowledge and experience with quality principles and methods. The quality engineering specialization prepares students to help a wide variety of businesses and organizations in developing and implementing quality systems to improve their productivity and competitiveness, and the quality of life.

Managers of today's organizations and enterprises are faced with an enormous number of competitive pressures as well as a revolution in philosophy and methodologies for improving their systems, whether they be in manufacturing, health care, business agencies or government. In all cases, the demand is for better products and/or services at lower costs.

Total Quality Control, Design for Assembly, Design for Manufacturability, Quality Function Deployment, Kaizen, Statistical Process Control, Taguchi Methods, and a host of additional tools and methodologies have all proven to provide substantial improvements in quality, reduction in cost, increased productivity, or improved responsiveness when the concepts are applied correctly in appropriate settings. It is the job of the quality engineer to understand and apply these new methodologies to guide the improvement of the organization. This job may be done working as a quality engineer or manager in an industrial environment, in a health care organization, in a consulting company, in the education field, in government or in other areas of the service sector. The job opportunities are varied and plentiful.

The need for quality engineering specialists to design and operate more productive systems that improve both competitiveness and the quality of work and life is rapidly increasing as worldwide economic and population growth accelerates. In the United States, there is a demand for continuous improvement of product designs and manufacturing systems to help our industries meet intense competition from abroad. Likewise, needs for improvements in health care delivery and workplace design call for quality professionals who can meet these new demands. This challenge will require a large number of quality systems engineers in industry, business and academia, and this need will exist well into the next century.

Laboratory Facilities and Research Centers
The interdisciplinary curriculum in the quality engineering specialization draws on the sophisticated computer equipment and laboratory resources of the many outstanding departments in the College of Engineering and throughout UW-Madison. For example, the School of Business adds strength in the areas of total quality management and organization design and behavior. The Department of Statistics provides excellent resources for training in the fundamental methodologies necessary to solve problems through data collection and analysis. In the College of Engineering, cutting-edge technologies and equipment, like the advanced coordinate measuring machine and software, allow for hands-on research and experience. Likewise, high technology classrooms and industry-based projects provide opportunities for learned by doing and working with people in teams. Several other facilities provide the opportunity for advanced study, including Computer-Aided Engineering.

It is widely recognized that quality is fundamental to achieving long-term success. A renewed focus on customers and processes sets the stage for continuous improvement for industry, government, educational institutions, healthcare, and businesses. All have benefited from higher quality and productivity as well as reduced time and cost to develop, produce, deliver products and services, and improved safety. Data-based total quality methods are the catalyst to help people achieve these benefits.

Laboratory for Manufacturing System Realization and Synthesis (MA/RS)

The goal of this laboratory is to develop a science base for a new manufacturing system realization and quality improvement. It will bring together research on manufacturing system CAD/CAM models and statistics-based methods for design, control, and diagnostics of multistage manufacturing processes behavior/quality. In doing so it addresses the following areas: (1) system decomposition and analysis using the concept of product/process key characteristics and their causalities; (ii) developing statistical methods driven by engineering models to achieve quality improvement, i.e., integrating models of data sets with efficient CAD/CAM models of manufacturing systems instead of identifying model(s) of data set alone as in the traditional SPC; and, (iii) application of the developed models towards: root cause diagnosis of manufacturing variability; distributed sensing system/networks; and manufacturing system design evaluation and optimization in early design phases. Information generated is further applied to study reusable/reconfigurable multistage manufacturing systems convertability, scalability and diagnosability. Resources available include: PCs, laser tracker, various software (CAM, VSA, …).

For more details please see the MA/RS website at: www.cae.wisc.edu/~darek.

Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement

It is widely recognized that quality is fundamental to achieving long-term success. A renewed focus on customers and processes sets the stage for continuous improvement for industry, government, educational institutions, healthcare, and businesses. All have benefited from higher quality and productivity as well as reduced time and cost to develop, produce, deliver products and services, and improved safety. Data-based total quality methods are the catalyst to help people achieve these benefits.

To rise to the challenge of the international quality revolution, the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement (CQPI) was founded in October of 1985 by Professor George E.P. Box and the late Professor William G. Hunter. Since its inception, CQPI has been at the forefront in the development of new techniques for improving the quality of products and processes. Today, the Center is also at the forefront of methods aimed at improving the quality of work processes, quality of working life, and quality of healthcare.

The mission of the Center is to create, integrate, and transfer knowledge to improve the quality and performance of industrial, service, governmental, healthcare, educational, social, and other organizations.

The vision of the Center is to excel in the creation, development, and integration of knowledge through research on theories, concepts, and methodologies of quality and productivity measurement, management and improvement, innovation and organizational change.

Areas of expertise in quality engineering, quality management, quality improvement in healthcare, safety applications and research, and quality of working life, human factors and ergonomics.

Major research support has come from the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the UW Graduate School, the State of Wisconsin, and private industry.