A team of engineers presents the results of a project, trying to sum up three months of work in just 30 minutes, under the watchful eye of a C-level executive.
That’s the scene awaiting University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students after graduation. But it’s one the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering has begun creating for its undergraduates while they’re still in school.
Since fall 2022, the department has invited members of its industrial advisory board—alumni who are now leaders in manufacturing, healthcare, tech and other sectors—to visit its senior design capstone course and offer feedback on student teams’ final presentations.
It’s part of a broader effort within ISyE to enhance its students’ communication skills, based on feedback from alumni.
“You can throw up a slide that has all the numbers in the world, but if you can’t tell someone what it means, what good is it?” says senior Andrew Thompson, who is joining West Monroe, a consulting firm in Chicago, after graduating in December 2023.
Thompson is part of a group of five students who have spent the fall 2023 semester working with Sub-Zero Group, the Madison-based appliance manufacturer, to optimize its plastic door liner manufacturing operations.
Each semester, seniors in ISyE 450 partner with a range of companies and nonprofit organizations to apply their technical skills to their clients’ real problems. They create swimlane diagrams, identify pain points and root causes, use Pugh Matrices to compare potential solutions, run computational models to forecast improvements, and more.
Another group of students has helped Specialty Care Free Clinic, a Madison nonprofit that provides specialty healthcare to uninsured, low-income patients, to modernize its volunteer scheduling system.
Engineering systems to help the Madison community
“Ultimately, their success comes down to their customer satisfaction,” says Terry Mann, a senior lecturer in ISyE who teaches the course. “I want them to meet their client’s needs more so than hit a rubric.”
And part of meeting a client’s needs is delivering recommendations in an understandable, digestible manner that balances details with big-picture results. Which is why department industrial advisory board member Mindy Rapp (MS in manufacturing systems engineering ’96) sat in on a recent class session and offered guidance like not trying to cram too much information into a 30-minute presentation.
“Messaging truly matters,” says Rapp, the chief operating officer of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin-based ScanPac Manufacturing. “You can take the same information, the exact same information, and how you message it makes a big impact.”
ISyE industrial advisory board member Mindy Rapp offers feedback to students during their final presentations. Photos by Tom Ziemer.
Top photo caption: Senior Ava Schmidt presents her group’s work on behalf of Madison-based appliance manufacturer Sub-Zero Group.