To develop the student's concept of a production system within a contemporary international context, in terms of its complexity and intellectual challenge.

1. The large picture. International competition and specialisation, the extended enterprise, international supply-chain concept, structure of supply-chains and individual business units. Design questions. Types of flow: information, materials and monetary flows, IT-based enterprise planning and control superstructures. The key importance of the engineer's talents. 2. What is a product? contemporary concept of 'a product' - product, service and product-service offerings, product and process life-cycles, getting customers what they want: the production-consumption cycle, representation - bill-of-materials, bill of capacities, types of order-fulfilment - make-to-stock, engineer-to-order, make-to-order, configure-to order, off-the-shelf. Demand-pull versus supply-push, Just-In-Time concept. 3. Objectives - What is meant by High-Performance - Economy, agility, innovation, security/risk. Two concepts of time - machine time, capacity and cost; cycle-time, delay and WIP. Forms of waste and economy of operations. Variabilities in the system. System responsiveness and agility. Service-cost trade-offs. Time-to-market and innovation. System risk and human-tech work. 4. The 'nervous system' of an enterprise: a complex spectrum of enterprise control systems - material flow, information flow, quality, operations scheduling, physical plant, human resources, supply base, markets, proprietary process and product knowledge, finance. 5. The enterprise 'anatomy': Front-line departments in a business unit - Marketing, Research and Development, Engineering, Manufacturing, Logistics. Drilling-down the hierarchy - global supply-chains, companies, facilities, work-centres, operators and machines. 6. Designing the individual work-centre: what is work? physical work and knowledge work, design of work-centres, functions of 'machines' and operators, fitting the machine to the operator, task analysis and performance prediction, error prediction, standardisation, simplification and minimal work-flow, implications of good and bad design. 7. Designing the facility: process analysis, layout of facilities, space allowances, adjacency desirability, minimal distance, WIP, capacity determination and bottlenecks, safety, hazardous processes and storage, security. Implications of good and bad design. 8. Combining enterprises into supply-chains: supply-make-deliver, location decisions, transportation alternatives, site selection, why companies choose one country over another. Placing inventory - dynamic phenomena in supply-chain control - the beer game. Implications of good and bad design. 9. Operationalising 'soft' systems improvement - PDCA cycle (plan-do-check-act), motivation and human-centred operations improvement, quality circles, ASRS reporting systems in air transportation, six-sigma, lean, future 'soft' technologies?

After successfully completing this module, students should have attained an understanding and appreciation for the following concepts: 1. structure of international enterprises in the form of supply-chains 2. how these are made up of individual business units and production facilities 3. how these might be designed, and the implications of good and bad design 4. the concept of a product, as broader than a physical object 5. the 'anatomy' and 'nervous system' of an enterprise 6. Human-centred operations improvement processes. 7. Will be able to explain the impacts of processes and products on the environment 8. Will be able to assess the ecological footprint of a selected product and produce a core study report into its environmental sustainability 9. Will be able to specifyMaterials selection for sustainability. 10. Will be able to describe Irish Legislation, and EU directives covering, accumulators, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), Energy using Products (EuP).Environmental Management Systems (EMS), product considerations in EMSs, and Environmental Auditing,

Will be aware of the importance of Irish Legislation covering packaging, extended producer responsibility, waste, and EU directives covering, accumulators, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) Will be able to make judgements on Renewable materials and energy and the ethical implications of these.

N/A