ISyE 4104 Design I

January 12, 2000

Prerequisites: ISyE 4044, 4101, 4102

Schedule for 4104

Potential Projects

Potential Groups

Course Objectives

Over a period of two semesters, the Senior Design course sequence is intended to provide:

1. a problem analysis and system design experience similar to ISyE professional practice, and
2. an opportunity to practice and perfect the skills of technical report writing and oral presentation.

By the time you complete senior design at the end of Summer 2000, you should have improved your skills significantly in:

Systems analysis and design including the ability to

• define a problem,
• identify and analyze relevant factors,
• develop a model of the problem,
• choose and apply appropriate methodologies and computational tools,
• generate and evaluate alternative approaches for accomplishing the desired objective, and
• design the needed system.

Technical Writing

You have chosen a field that demands effective written communication. Your skill in documenting the results of your work will determine to a large extent the value of that work.

In addition to developing good writing skills, you should explore the possibilities offered by computing and networked information systems. Subject to any constraints imposed by your company, you may want to publish appropriate reports on the World Wide Web, and use the Internet for communication and collaboration.

Public Speaking

It is not enough to do good work, you must also convince others, who may be apathetic or even antagonistic, that the work is good. Your skill in clear, concise, and convincing presentation may make the difference between a successful project and fruitless effort.

Team Work

Life in the real world entails working together with people from different backgrounds, interests, styles, and temperaments. You will learn to cooperate with a diverse group of individuals and coordinate your activities with others in your group and your client, even when there are conflicting priorities. Successful groups learn to work harmoniously, complete the work on time, and prepare effective and well-written reports.

Use this opportunity to find out more about the kind of career you want and as a launch pad for that career. This is a chance for you to find out about a prospective occupation or even a future employer. This is also an opportunity for future employers, customers or clients to find out about you. Even if you do not later work for your project company, your experience with them can help you get a good job and might help you do a good job.

This course provides an opportunity for you to learn about the business world. Keep your eyes and ears open to your company's culture. Find out how the company has distinguished itself from its competitors, how it projects itself externally and how it views itself internally. To be successful in this course, your recommendations must be consistent with the company's strategy and culture. More than that, to be successful in your career, you must be sensitive to your employer's, your competitors' and your customers' corporate strategy and culture.

Faculty Advisors

After your team has a project definition (Report 1), you will be assigned a faculty advisor. You are responsible for keeping your advisor informed of your intentions and progress. You may, however, call upon any of us or any other faculty for advice and assistance.

Project Teams

Each project team will have six members, and you are free to form your own team.

Remember that in joining a team you are committing to carry your share of the responsibility and in asking someone to join your team you are accepting responsibility for the quality of his/her work. Your advisor is not responsible for browbeating laggards into shape. If your team members do not carry their share of the load, you will have to carry it for them.

On Tuesday, 18 January 2000, you must submit the list of team members(names and phone numbers).

Attach to this list (S1) a one-page résumé for each member describing professional interests and experience (if any) together with a schedule of the courses being taken this semester. Designate one person to be the lead contact.

Selecting a Company and Project

Each team must identify an institution and a suitable project. Choose your institution and your project carefully. This is a strategic decision. Remember, this course offers a valuable opportunity to distinguish yourself. Do not throw it away by choosing a project haphazardly.

The undergraduate office maintains a file in which you will find letters from a few companies specifically requesting senior design groups. You may also find projects listed at

http://www.isye.gatech.edu/faculty/T_Govindaraj/text/courses/4104/available.html

The faculty advisors (as well as other ISyE professors) may have information

about other possible projects. If you have not yet found a company and a project, you are already far behind and well on your way to wasting the most valuable opportunity of your undergraduate education!

Be creative in your search for projects. Consider less traditional areas of endeavor, e.g.,

• Hospitals
• State and local governments (e.g., the police department)
• Banks
• Charitable or non-profit organizations

Once you have identified an organization, you need to contact an appropriate person within the organization. As a rule of thumb, it is better to reach too high into the management of the organization than too low. Higher level executives will have greater perspective, broader authority and easier access.

Be extremely circumspect in all your communications. Initially, you will not know the corporate culture, so it is best to tread lightly and be extremely polite.

You are not under any obligation to accept a project, but be sure not to leave any loose ends. If you decide not to take a project be sure to thank -- in writing -- everyone you contacted and politely explain that you have found something else.

When you think you have found a suitable project, prepare a description of the firm and a definition of the proposed project and submit it for approval. This is Report 1, due Thursday, 3 February. In fact, we expect you to turn in descriptions of two separate projects: one clearly identified as the primary project, and the other as a back-up.

We expect you to spend at least 6 hours on this project each week for the next two semesters. That comes to about 200 hours for each team member or 1,200 hours

for each team. This represents about 50% of one full-time working year. A junior industrial engineer costs approximately $100,000/year including benefits, etc. Your efforts should add at least about $50,000 to the value of your company. This should be the absolute lower limit. If you view the time spent as the equivalent of a consultant's time over the same period, worth about $2,000 per day, the value comes to about $300,000. In most cases, it is not unreasonable to expect this much saving to the client as a result of your project. Please use these figures to help you choose your project.

Preparing the Proposal

Attached is a guideline format for Report 2, the Project Proposal. Your proposal will be regarded as a "contract", and you will be expected to perform as promised both by your company and by your faculty advisor.

Relationships with Companies

The project will require considerable time and effort from employees of your company. This represents an expense. Nevertheless, companies participate in these projects for three reasons:

1. they expect to receive valuable assistance,
2. to express good will toward Georgia Tech and its students,and
3. to promote your education so that industry may benefit from more capable young engineers.

ISyE project teams must behave professionally and reinforce that feeling of good will.

Students are not allowed to receive compensation for work done in ISyE 4104-5.

Companies may provide assistance in the form of photocopying and typing services, and in some cases, supplies and travel expenses.

We recommend you give your company a copy of this entire handout. You may also want to give them the URL for the course.

Once again, settle all contacts you make with prospective firms. Once you decide on your project, write the other firms you have contacted to inform them that you will be unable to work with them, and thank them for the cooperation and time they have given you.

Act as Professionals

You should function as if you were an employee reporting to your faculty advisor and to your corporate contact. Among others, you should:

• Keep your client's best interests as your paramount concern.
• Apply the proper tools and methodologies thoroughly, accurately, honestly and in a manner appropriate for the task at hand.
• Dress neatly and appropriately for the occasion.
• Always be prompt and punctual.
• Write clearly and type all reports.
• Include a title page, table of contents and page numbers in long reports.
• Use drawings that are neat, clean, properly titled, and scaled.
• Keep a copy of everything youu give your faculty advisor or client.
• Keep well organized records of all your work.
• Date all your reports and correspondence.
• Use correct names (and titles where appropriate).
• Appropriately acknowledge everyone who assisted you in your efforts.
• Be honest in your dealings with colleagues, clients, and faculty.

The Challenge of Design

The Senior Design sequence is probably the most valuable course in the curriculum. It is also one of the most difficult. Your problems will not be clearly defined, relevant data will be unavailable or hard to obtain, the proper analysis techniques may not be apparent, solutions will not be exact, and you will disagree about the right course of action. After working two months on a project you may discover you are on the wrong track and that the real problem lies elsewhere.

This is your challenge. You will face situations unlike those presented in textbook examples. You will need to recall material from the many courses you have taken at Tech and your faculty advisor will expect you to demonstrate

competence in all of them. On top of this, you will have to learn new material not covered in your courses, outside your advisor's areas of expertise.

Above all, you will be evaluated on how effectively you work, not how hard you work. Your contribution will be measured in terms of the value it adds to

the project, not in terms of the hours you spend on it. So, you must not only work hard, you must also work smart.

Grading

Your faculty advisor prefers to assign the same grade to everyone in your team.

However, it is not uncommon to assign different grades depending on the individual contributions. Factors determining your grade include:

1. The value your project has added and the professional level of your results. (Your faculty advisor will elicit your corporate contact's opinions of this.)
2. The quality of your presentations.
3. The quality of written reports.
4. Your attendance during class presentations, meetings with your advisor and group members.

Note that it is very important that your reports and presentations be of high quality, so spend the time and effort to do these well. We anticipate you will invest nearly one third of your time preparing reports and presentations.

Information for Sponsors

The Senior Design Sequence

For many years all senior students in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering have culminated their undergraduate educational experience with the nine-month sequence of senior design courses ISyE 4104-5.

Many enterprises in the Atlanta area have cases that can be successfully studied and solved by a small group of industrial engineering students working for experience and academic credit instead of money. Our hundreds of "satisfied customers" include a majority of the well-known businesses in the Atlanta area, and other enterprises such as hospitals and various local city and county government departments.

Student groups work as unpaid outside consultants satisfying their interest in a real world design experience. They work on well-defined, specific design activities.

Each group spends approximately 1200 hours on the project over the course of nine months. This effort is focused on resolving a specific problem or completing a specific project and is not intended for carrying out day-to-day

operations.

What the Sponsor Does

The first step is for the sponsor to identify a need or opportunity. For example, one year Rich's felt their delivery truck fleet could have better maintenance scheduling; the downtown Marriott felt the need for a more consistent, fair and profitable parking policy; Selig Chemical saw the need to organize their warehouse more efficiently; the Atlanta Journal and Constitution felt its wastage of newsprint could be reduced by a few tons per year; the Bairstow Distributing Company realized they needed to computerize their inventory system; and Rollins Security found their service people could travel a lot less if their trips were better scheduled. When students contacted these enterprises, they found enthusiastic potential sponsors. ISyE students are well prepared to design maintenance schedules, routing and delivery systems, warehouse layouts and materials handling systems, waste control programs, and requirements and specifications for information systems. They can apply operations research, simulation, statistics, and other technical tools to a wide variety of problems, and they can back up their design choices with thorough economic analysis.

The steps in participating are:

• Meet with the student group to explore possibilities, and determine, loosely, what kind of beneficial projectcould reasonably be performed by a neophyte consulting group of industrial and systems engineers -- usually six students working for about 200 to 300 hours, each, over nine months.
• Assign a responsible technical or managerial person to give the group guidance, operations and economic information, and plant access. During the nine months, this person will probably spend two or three hours a week interacting with group members.
• Arrange for an appropriate management level to receive and consider the group's formal proposal (R2, 2 months), interim report (R3, 3 months), tentative results and conclusions (R4, R5, 6 months) and final design (R6, 8 months).
• Participate in evaluating the students' work.

Accessing the project reports on the World Wide Web

The syllabus and the up-to-date course and presentation schedules are available on the web. We would also like to publish the student reports on the World Wide Web to help the students develop on-line publishing skills and to help future students become familiar with the senior design process. This will be done only with the sponsor's consent, and the sponsor can refuse on-line publication for any reason. Publishing on the web provides free publicity and exposure to the sponsors. In addition, people in the organization who may not be directly involved with the project, but who may benefit nevertheless, can access the reports.

If the sponsors consent, we plan to provide unlimited access to Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff. Access to others will be restricted by password.

Reports

Report S1: Project Team

ISyE 4104

Spring 2000

Designate team's lead contact with *.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Will all team members enroll in ISyE 4105 during Summer 2000?

Attach résumés and current schedules.

Guidelines for Report 1: Project Definition

ISyE 4104

Spring 2000

Cover Page:

• Team Identification
• Team member names
• Organization name
• Organization business address
• Main contact person name
• Main contact person position
• Main contact person telephone number

Description of the organization

Where is the organization's headquarters? What kind of business is the organization in? How many people does it employ? Other measures of size, for example annual revenues, market share, annual profits, etc. Similar information about the department you will work with directly.

Description of problem symptoms

Be careful to describe a problem, not a solution. For example, "The department needs a new conveyor system" is a poor problem description. A better description would explain the difficulties leading to the conclusion that the company needs a new conveyor system.

Design objective

Describe what you hope to accomplish for the company. Be careful not to get locked into foregone conclusions. For example, "Identify the new conveyor system to purchase" is a poor design objective -- a better resolution of the problems may simply involve clever adjustments to the existing system. On the other hand, be sure to have clear, attainable objective: "Solve the company's problems" is not a good design objective either.

Guidelines for Report 2: Project Proposal

ISyE 4104

Spring 2000

Detailed outlines for this report often result in similar-looking proposals, few of which are very good. This is obviously undesirable. Therefore, we offer below broad guidelines that you can adapt for your specific project.

Whenever you write anything, be sure to have an audience in mind. For whom are you writing this report? Identifying your audience for this report is a bit challenging. In fact you are writing to two very different audiences: your corporate contact (first) and your faculty advisor (second). This causes some peculiar difficulties. For example, although your corporate contact knows more about the company than you do, your faculty advisor does not. On the other hand, while your faculty advisor may be very familiar with some of your proposed methods, your corporate contact may not be. You should include all the information for both audiences, but organize it so that each reader may easily find the material of interest to her. When you describe the organization, for example, write to your faculty advisor, but remember that your corporate contact will be looking over your shoulder. When you describe your methods, on the other hand, write to your corporate client, but remember that your faculty advisor will be looking over your shoulder.

Once you have identified your audience, you need to figure out what you want to tell them and how you are going to say it. This is the hard work of writing.

You must organize your thoughts and pick your words so your ideas are clear and easy to follow. If your ideas are not clear or you do not have any ideas at all, your writing will be difficult to follow. Conversely, if your writing is difficult to read...

So, to the heart of the matter. Your proposal should begin with a cover letter to your corporate contact thanking her for suggesting the project and indicating

your desire to work on it. In a sense this letter is a formal request for your contact to accept your proposal as a binding contract. You are bound to do the work described in the proposal and your contact is bound, albeit with less dire consequences to her if she fails, to provide the support you specifically request.

The proposal, then, must accomplish two things:

1. It must spell out your expectations from the company (Be sure to discuss these with your contact before putting them in the proposal.) and
2. It must spell out what the company can expect from you in return.

After the cover letter, you should probably include a project summary that provides a one or two page overview of the project intended for, say, higher level executives who are interested, but do not have time to read the whole proposal. We recommend you include an executive summary like this in all of your

reports.

The main body of the proposal should probably begin with a description of the organization your working with (for the faculty advisor) and a brief description of Senior Design (so the company knows what this is all about). Your description of the organization should focus on the department with which you will be working.

Next, describe the problem in some detail. Provide quantitative evidence of its magnitude and significance whenever possible.

At this point you are ready to describe what the company can expect from you. Begin with a very brief objective, but follow this up with any supplemental information necessary to delineate the project. Include a detailed description of your "deliverables". For example, will you be delivering production code, a working system, a prototype or specifications? Will you provide a method to solve the problem whenever and where ever it arises or will you simply solve the present problem? Estimate the likely benefits to the company. Remember these should be worth at least $50,000, but do not promise what you cannot deliver.

In fact, you want to avoid the tragedy that will certainly arise if the company expects more than you give.

Provide evidence that you know how to accomplish all that you promise. Describe the specific steps you will take and give a credible schedule of when you will complete them.

Describe what you expect from the company. Be sure to discuss each item in detail with your contact before you include it in the proposal. Try to anticipate the kinds of assistance and information you will need and the form you will need it in. Do not get caught in the position of needing key information to complete your project only to discover half way through that it

simply is not available!

In summary, your proposal should include:

• A cover letter
• A project summary
• A description of the company and of senior design
• A description of the problem
• A description of the deliverables and estimates of their value
• A description of what specific steps you plan to take along with a schedule
• A description of what you will require from the company