Teaching Manufacturing Strategies and Structures in higher Education

The importance of software systems for the planning and execution of production has drastically increased over the past decades. This has lead to a growth in number of software systems used within sites. The company’s problem today is no longer only to find relevant software systems but rather to coordinate and synchronize existing systems. Students at higher technical educations e.g., bachelors and masters, are traditionally taught in software programming and factory automation. Students at higher economical and management schools are exposed to different manufacturing strategies and their economical impacts. However, in many education programs, the larger perspective, of how to combine the technical and the economical aspects is not highlighted. Without a clear structure of how to tackle the puzzle of combining the different software systems, the risk of getting a complex and fragmented information exchange between a company’s hierarchical levels and functions is high, this, with the bi-effect that production strategies with regards to time, cost, flexibility and quality are not maximized.

Technology Management is a unique program at Lund University, where a selected number of students from The School of Management and Economics in Lund and from Lund Institute of Technology are taught together during their last year of study. Their views on problems and challenges in today’s industry often complement each other. The course “Technology, Strategy and Structure” includes, among other things, projects done in collaboration with industries. In this course the usage of the ISA 95 standard, as a tool for structuring complex information exchange within production sites and for harmonizing the company’s information flow, is discussed, analyzed and used in the projects.

This paper includes a discussion about how the ISA 95 can be incorporated in higher technical and economical studies, and it describes some of the industry projects done by the students.