From Wednesday, Jan 18th to Sunday January, 22nd, the UW department of Management Sciences sent their first ever delegation of Management Engineering students to attend and compete at the annual Institute of Industrial Engineers Conference. The management engineers performed exceptionally well. For those not aware, management engineering is essentially a contemporary industrial engineering degree; we learn many of the same theories of optimization. However management engineers are trained more to apply these techniques to services, whereas traditional industrial engineers apply these concepts to manufacturing. A total of 16 UW students attended, including 10 fourth-years and 6 third-years.
The conference featured 4 competitions and despite having one of the smaller delegations, UW was the only school to compete in every competition. The competitions included Technical Paper, Simulation, Case Study and Theoretical.
The first competition was Technical Paper in which students submit an appropriate technical paper 1 month before the conference, and then make a 15 minute presentation, followed by 3 minutes for questions, during the conference. This is the only competition in which students compete for both cash prizes and the opportunity to represent Canada at the internal IIE conference in Orlando, Fl in May 2012.
The next competition was the Theoretical competition in which teams of 4 students write a 3 hour exam focusing on industrial engineering concepts, particularly mathematical optimization techniques.
The third competition was the Simulation competition. 1 month prior to the conference, teams of 3-4 students create a simulation model with preliminary information for a given process. During the conference, the students are provided with the final information to complete their model and are given 5 hours to finish their model and create a 15 minute presentation. Each team presents their simulation solution before a panel of judges and is questioned on their approach.
The final competition is the Case Study, in which teams of 4 students are presented a real world problem and are given 5 hours to determine a solution and make a presentation of their findings. This year’s case study was sponsored by Garrison Brewery so each team toured the brewery and had to identify and propose process improvements. The teams create a 15 minute presentation and are given 5 minutes of questions by the panel of judges, including the client (Garrison Brewery).
At the awards ceremony, UW’s management engineering competitors stole the show:
- Amanda LeDuc, 1st Place Technical Paper. Amanda is going on to represent Canada and compete in the Internal IIE Conference in Orlando, Florida in May 2012
- Chris Smellie, 2nd Place Technical Paper
- Yousif Al-Khder, Pranav Sampat, Helen Liang, Molly Beckel, 2nd Place Theoretical Competition
Furthermore, UW brought home the Golden I trophy which is awarded based on competition performance and participation, conference speaker attendance, team promotional video, and overall spirit. Considering that this was UW’s first time competing at an IIE Conference, winning so many awards was a testament to the quality of the management engineering program. It also speaks to the fact Management Engineers are far superior to Industrial Engineers in many ways (just kidding, Industrial Engineers are awesome too).
The students who participated would like to thank the department of Management Sciences for sponsoring in full our trip to the conference. Particularly, we were thrilled to have Prof Duimering attend and support us in all of our competitions, as well as Shelley Vossen (management engineering undergrad coordinator) for helping with the administrative details surrounding the trip.
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