Materials Process Engineer Master’s Degree Apprenticeship

To provide an introduction to manufacturing technology and materials. Introduce you to the key skills required to write proposals and understand how to prepare the costs. To familiarise students with teamworking, ethics and concepts. To develop your personal skills in management and team working.

• Overview of the programme and course, project management, technical writing and communication presentations, environmental issues. Learning styles, group and team working and self-study.
• Manufacturing technology, introduction to engineering materials life cycles, health, safety and environment. Research techniques including writing proposals and resourcing.

To introduce you to the core factors of managing operations and the concept of flow in operations.

• An introduction to manufacturing organisations and functions.

• The theory of operations, flow in manufacturing and what enables/inhibits it.

• Order winners, Order qualifiers, and competitive priorities.

• Key Performance Indicators in manufacturing.

• Product/Process matrix, facility layouts, production strategies, product families.

• Customer Demand and capacity planning, and standardization.

• Process flow diagrams, and value stream maps.

• S&OP, Master Production Scheduling, BOM, and scheduling rules.

• Push vs Pull production.

• Information systems; MRP, MPRll, ERP, and Kanban systems.

• Maintenance management strategies.

• Dimensions of Quality, Quality management frameworks, and the cost of quality.

• Roles of inventory; inventory management systems and measures.

• Lean Manufacturing.

• Class discussion of cases, exercises, and videos to support this syllabus.

On successful completion of this module you will be able to:

1. Discuss the importance of the operations functions of an organisation and how operations performance can impact the success of the whole organisation.

2. Assess production and capacity management strategies that can be deployed to meet customer demand for products and services.

3. Assess the importance of inventory, maintenance, and quality management systems in achieving high levels of operational performance.

4. Determine the role of information in planning, control, and scheduling, including the role of IT systems.

5. Critique the different attributes of the Lean Production System and how they apply to contemporary operational contexts.

To develop a rigorous and logical application of tools and techniques to design and control operational systems to improve speed, quality, and cost, and achieve environmentally responsible operations.

• Six Sigma, Process capability, common and special cause variability, control charts, acceptance sampling.

• ​System thinking and methods for decision-making to enable the system change.

• ​Lean Manufacturing Frameworks such as DMAIC.

• ​Methods for customer/business requirements identification, data collection and data validation.

• ​Analysis of systems to produce simple models. PFMA. Business process fundamentals and the process review. Improvement procedures, modelling methods and process models. Performance measurement.​

On successful completion of this module you should be able to:

1. Explore and develop effective action in solving problems that an organization or business has, enabling systems to change by applying different lean production frameworks, system thinking tools, and methods for decision-making.

2. Demonstrate understanding of the current state of the process and collect baseline information on process speed, quality, and costs exposing underlying causes of problems by applying process flow tools and methods for data collection and validation.

3. Determine potential and root causes of variation that have the most effect on the critical process results, such as process lead time and process cycle efficiency, by demonstrating an understanding of Six Sigma and Statistical Process Control tools and techniques.

4. Identify opportunities for fully functional process improvement that will help achieve the project goals aligned with environmentally responsible operation by demonstrating understanding of tools and techniques for selection and testing solutions.

5. Implement the chosen solutions and explain how to develop, analyse and validate appropriate process control.

To give you an introduction to some of the key general management, personal management and project management skills needed to influence and implement change.

Management Accounting Principles and Systems.

Personal style and team contribution, interpersonal dynamics, leadership, human and cultural diversity.

Project Management: structure and tools for project management.

Introduction to standards: awareness of standards, relevant standards (quality, environment and H&S), value of using standards, management of the standard and audit.

On successful completion of this module you will be able to:

1. Interpret and organize the objectives, principles, terminology, and systems of management accounting.
2. Assess the inter-relationships between functional responsibilities in a company.
3. Assess and select among the different management styles, team roles, different cultures, and how the management of human diversity can impact organisational performance.
4. Interpret and analyse the structure, aspects, and tools for project management.
5. Critically assess the ethical and social responsibilities within an engineering context.

As a Master level course this module has to develop knowledge, critical scientific thinking and hands-on experiences for developing a product. A scholarly approach of product development, project management and evolution, as well as the use of the most suitable material and technology, are expected. Research appropriately into customer and market requirements and their analysis to translate the requirements into product specification.

• Introduction to Product Development (PD).

• Concurrent Engineering

• PD Tools and Methods.

• Lean Product Development

• Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE).

• SBCE Industrial Case Studies.

• PD in Knowledge-based Environment.

• Trade-Off Curves to enable SBCE.

• Tutorial PD Project.

On successful completion of this module you should be able to:

1. Assess the application of product development process in lean environment and addressing global collaboration.

2. Design a process of product development based on the principles of set-based concurrent engineering.

3. Formulate the process of selection of materials and manufacturing processes.

4. Appraise the application of tools and techniques to support product development such as QFD, DFM, DFA, and FMEA.

5. Create and manage product development knowledge to solving product design and development problems and to enable trade-off between design solutions.

• Dr Jeff Rao

To provide an understanding of the role that surfaces play in materials behaviour; concentrating on multiple functionalities.( e.g mechanical, optical, biomedical, catalytic, electronic, and self-healing) of thin film and coating systems. To introduce the concepts of functional surface engineering and how they may be used to optimise a components performance. To introduce suitable analytical techniques used to evaluate and characterise surfaces and thin film samples.

• Philosophy of functional surface engineering, general applications and requirements. 
• Principles and design of coatings. 
• Surface engineering as part of a manufacturing process. 
• Integrating coating systems into the design process. 
• Coating manufacturing processes; Electro deposition. Auto-catalytic deposition, physical and chemical vapour deposition, Ion-beam techniques, plasma spray deposition. 
• Analytical Techniques: X-ray diffraction, TEM, SEM and EDX analysis, surface analysis by AES and XPS, overview of synchrotron-radiation based techniques for thin films. 
• Data interpretation, process control and approaches to materials analysis. 
• Coating systems for industrial applications, Multilayered coating architectures.
• Applications of functional films in electronic, catalysis and biomedical applications.

• Demonstrate a practical understanding of the concepts of surface engineering as part of a manufacturing process.
• Explain the principles of physical vapour deposition, chemical vapour deposition and other coating technologies and describe the relevance of the technology to industry.
• Describe and critically appraise applications of coating technologies when fabricating coating designs.
• Discuss the methodology and select appropriate analytical techniques to characterise the material microstructure of a coating and determine its likely performance.
• Provide examples of functional coating systems and tools to evaluate their performance.

This module will enable students to gain an understanding of the physical principles and operating characteristics of a selected manufacturing process and how data analytics, automation and process sensors can improve manufacturing operations. The module is also intended to develop students’ skills in communication, project management, and the implementation of process improvement techniques.

• Fundamentals of manufacturing process automation
• Sensors and data acquisition
• Manufacturing process analysis
• Principles of automation
• Design and analysis of experiments
• Evaluation and industrial implementation of research data
• Economics of manufacturing process operations
• Project Planning

• Appraise the different approaches for optimising the performance of manufacturing systems.
• Design a programme of work directed towards optimising the performance of an existing manufacturing operation.
• Make a proposal for enhancements to this manufacturing operation that offers improved performance with a reduction in overall cost of operation.
• Construct a project plan for the installation of the improved system of work with associated cost benefit analysis.