The aim of this module is to introduce and develop understanding of the design, planning, operation and control of operating systems and appropriate measures of economic performance to develop an understanding of maintenance and reliability, quality assurance and control, project management and supply chains and logistics.

Project Management: concepts, principles and tools for planning, monitoring and controlling, estimation and budgets.

Manufacturing Systems: the concept of a manufacturing system, system inputs and outputs, subsystems and design of manufacturing systems process, product and cellular factory layouts, use of simulation techniques to evaluate the behaviour and performance of systems.

Manufacturing Operations: the benefits and implications of group technology on manufacturing operations, coding and classification systems. Supply chain and make or buy decisions.

Production Planning and Control: stock and stock control, forecasting demand, re-order point system, Material Requirements planning (MRP), Just in Time (JIT), capacity requirements planning, scheduling, purchasing/procurement, JIT purchasing.

Maintenance and Reliability: introduction to maintenance, breakdown and preventative maintenance, condition monitoring, reliability theory, series and parallel systems, calculation of mean time to failure and mean time to repair.

Quality Assurance: introduction to quality, definitions and terminology quality management philosophies. Six Sigma.

Planning and Controlling Quality: variation and the need for control supplier analysis internal and external auditing, procedures the importance of effective planning, Quality Function Deployment (house of quality), the role of inspection in quality control, inspection methods and human factors in inspection, planning for inspection. Statistical quality control