The TIMEs
Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering • Cal Poly College of Engineering • Spring 2021
Pandemic Puts Learn by Doing to the Test
The TIMEs “I have been so impressed with the faculty, students, and staff in IME and how they have responded and come together to continue our outstanding educational traditions.”
IME students assembled two Thor’s Hammers for the Steel Founders’ Society of America’s Cast in Steel 2021 Competition. For more, see Page 6.
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appy Spring! So much has changed in the last year, but none of it has diminished our commitment at Cal Poly and the IME Department to our Learn by Doing focus. I have been so impressed with the faculty, students and staff in IME and how they have responded and come together to continue our outstanding educational traditions. Many of our faculty have been working tirelessly all year to offer more than 30 in-person lab classes each quarter, complete with all of the face shields, hand sanitizer and staggered scheduling needed to ensure COVID-19 safety for all involved. Our lab and equipment technician Bryan Lutz deserves major credit for making the labs transform within a very short time frame. Other faculty have cleverly pivoted their class content and projects to take advantage of new industry needs for COVID supplies, vaccine distribution networks and other pandemic-themed challenges. Message from Our students have also adjusted the Chair well. They have (largely) embraced the ————————————————— current reality of collaborating with Dan Waldorf each other and their instructors online, although I know we are all looking forward to more person-to-person experiences soon. Student groups are still busy planning our end-of-year department banquet and our upcoming Open House focused on new prospective students. And our dedicated department staff have doubled down their efforts to make our newly paperless systems flow efficiently as they handle the seemingly never-ending variety of student and faculty requests. While our methods for accomplishing our educational goals have been altered this year, nearly all of the activities we normally pursue have continued in one form or another. Students and faculty research has been strong, especially the efforts focused on the industrial internet of things (IIoT). These projects, which have dealt mostly with asset/inventory tracking and sensor monitoring for improved operations, have inspired a brand new Lab 2 | CAL POLY INDUSTRIAL & MANUFACTURING ENGINEERING
Sponsorship agreement with Viasat and have led to a new IIoT course being offered currently. Dr. Tali Freed, Dr. Alessandro Hill and Dr. Mohamed Awwad are especially pushing their students in new research areas and having them compete or participate in national (online) meetings and conferences. Other new courses have also resulted from research into emerging areas for industrial and manufacturing engineers. In Winter quarter, program grad Raj Parekh (IE ’15) taught a brand new class on Software Product Development, and in Spring Dr. Lizabeth Thompson is offering Change Management for Engineering Leaders. Students are very excited to take on the new concepts in these hot topical areas. And we have also been successful in re-tooling and reconfiguring our freshman manufacturing process classes to include several updated processes with new equipment for laser cutting, water-jet cutting and plastic/ composite molding. Our full-time instructor Rob Carter has even developed a new course for Spring in Intermediate Metal Casting that has all of our manufacturing engineers excited. As always, I hope you continue to feel connected to the IME Department. We miss our program graduates and we live for our connections to industry in California and around the world. We are always on the look-out for guest lecturers, senior project sponsors, student mentors and job connections, and other partnerships for education. And, finally, you can now learn more about what’s happening in the department on our new Instagram site (@calpolyime), which complements our existing Facebook and LinkedIn sites. We look forward to seeing you online or hopefully soon again in the IME office in Building 192 on campus. Feel free to reach out to us at ime@calpoly.edu or 805-756-2341. n
ON THE COVER IME 145 (Subtractive Manufacturing Process for Mechanical Designs) involves material removal manufacturing processes as related to mechanical design and includes manual and computer-controlled machining processes and equipment. Here, mechanical engineering student Jordan Troje works on a part on a lathe.
Manufacturing Engineering Student Inspires Ellen DeGeneres and Skating Legend Tony Hawk
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anufacturing engineering student Evan Lalanne was visibly shocked on the “The Ellen DeGeneres” show last November when the host called skateboarding legend Tony Hawk to the stage. Hawk had previously shared a viral Instagram video of Lalanne skating while in his wheelchair, and he agreed to surprise Lalanne during his appearance on the nationally syndicated talk show. Sitting next to Lalanne on stage, Hawk recalled his reaction to seeing that video. “It was awesome,” Hawk said, telling Lalanne, a manufacturing engineering student. “I was amazed at how much style you had doing it.” Lalanne and his girlfriend were hiking Bishop Peak in San Luis Obispo on Dec. 29, 2016 when he fell close to 40 feet. During the fall, he suffered a broken back and neck and several broken ribs. And after his helicopter rescue and prolonged therapy, he remained paralyzed. While he initially thought he would beat the odds and walk again, during his rehab, he accepted the realization that he would not. At that point, he told the San Luis Obispo Chamber of Commerce in 2019, he decided to adapt. “If I’m going to be paralyzed, then I might as well be really good at it,” he said. “I might as well be the best paraplegic I can be.” Once home, the Arroyo Grande native and sports enthusiast modified his motorized skateboard to accommodate his wheelchair, which is placed on the board in a perpendicular position. Since then, he has been recorded skating at various locations in San Luis
Cal Poly manufacturing engineering student Evan Lalanne appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2020.
Obispo County, including downtown San Luis Obispo and the Bob Jones Trail in Avila Beach. Meanwhile, Lalanne returned to school after missing just one full quarter. Not surprisingly, video of Lalanne speeding on a skateboard, leaning his chair back and forth for turns, went viral. Meanwhile, Lalanne — who also skis — has spoken publicly about embracing obstacles. “You can just see the joy on your face,” DeGeneres told him during the show. After a brief conversation with DeGeneres and Hawk, the trio went to a parking lot on the set, where Hawk and Lalanne skated together. Afterward, Hawk posted his own video of the event. “We skated the parking lot after his interview and he towed me until I got speed wobbles,” Hawk wrote. “Then pulled away like a veteran racer. It was truly inspiring.” n
“If I’m going to be paralyzed, then I might as well be really good at it. I might as well be the best paraplegic I can be.” — Evan LaLanne
The TIMEs
Standing Strong
Karl Ivory couldn’t go pro in football, so he went pro in engineering with a little help from his friends
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uring his sophomore year at Cal Poly, Karl Ivory was walking near Mott Gym – looking like an MTV stereotype, as he describes it — when a woman called out to him, ordering him to come to her. “Look at you!” said the woman, eyeing his attire. “Do you know who you represent? You have to carry yourself in a better way!” Marcia Foster, a coach for the women’s basketball team at the time, had never met Ivory, who was a cornerback on the football team. But she felt she had to set him straight. “You know why I yelled at him?” recalled Foster, now head coach and a teacher at Fullerton College. “He had his pants sagging. He was busy being cool. I wanted to encourage him to do more than be cool.” Roughly 20 years later, Ivory has realized the potential Foster saw, having worked as a successful engineer in Europe for over a decade – including his current role with a German startup developing air taxis. But he remembers Foster and others who helped him wage comebacks both on and off the field. “I’ve had people at Cal Poly take interest in me,” said Ivory from his home in England. “I had a great experience at Cal Poly.”
Ivory came to Cal Poly on a full football scholarship after graduating from Ontario High School — the same school astronaut and Cal Poly alumnus Victor Glover’s attended just before him. After arriving in San Luis Obispo, the first thing a fellow student said to him was, “You must play a sport here.” Determined to combat stereotypes about Black students in college, Ivory chose to study engineering, eventually choosing industrial engineering. But balancing football preparation and travel with a demanding major proved challenging. “When you’re playing a sport at a high level, it’s very time demanding,” Ivory said. “It’s not just the practice time and the weight training time, but then there are other things where you’re doing film studies, which you have to do on your own time.” Kurt Colvin, a professor in the Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Department and a key rebounder for the Mustangs basketball team in the 80s, identified with Ivory as a good athlete who battled that balance. “We didn’t get the best grades as undergraduates, not because of lack of Working as an engineer, Karl Ivory has lived in Europe for over a decade and has traveled widely, from the rocks of Stonehenge, above, to Thailand and its tigers at right.
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Karl Ivory takes off on a 73-yard interception that won the game for Cal Poly against North Dakota State in 2004. Ivory was a defensive standout on a Mustangs team that included two future NFL players. (Photo courtesy The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead)
intelligence or work ethic but because we were managing very full schedules with many diverse commitments,” Colvin said. Eventually, Ivory’s struggle to balance those two lives jeopardized both, reaching a tipping point when he received an expulsion letter. “I remember crying over that thing, thinking, ‘What am I going to tell my mom and what am I going to tell my friends?’” Ivory said. “’I’ve just been kicked out of school because I academically failed.’” Eventually, some of his supporters, including friend Charles Bell and defensive coach David Fipp, wrote letters on his behalf, and Ivory was reinstated — marking the beginning of his turnaround. “They put some faith in me, and I didn’t quit on myself,” Ivory said. “I don’t even know to this day if my mom and dad even knew I was kicked out of school.” Foster was one of the first key influences at Cal Poly. “She got me to reflect more on what I’m putting out there,” said Ivory, who recalled his attire during the initial encounter as saggy pants, an open shirt and multiple necklaces.
Karl Ivory admits he wasn’t a great student at Cal Poly, but he never gave up.
Being a young, cocky athlete is normal, said Foster, who had been a college athlete herself. But, she added, “Don’t be cool at the expense of being smart.” After her lecture, Foster invited Ivory to study at her office, which he did four times a week. “We would talk about what was going on, about football, about family, and we started doing Word of the Day,” said Foster, who would go on to mentor other students. “Every day he would come in and say, ‘Ok — what’s the word for the day?’” While schoolwork was never easy, Ivory worked his way off probation. “I’m not going to sit here and say I got straight A’s, but I turned it around,” he said. While academics had sidelined his football eligibility, his senior year, Ivory kicked off his gridiron comeback with an interception during the season opener. In the first five games of 2004, Ivory had four interceptions, including one for a 73-yard touchdown and a last-second, game-saving endzone pick. On a team with future NFL players Chris Gocong and Jordan Beck, Ivory garnered several accolades, including first team all-conference honors. He finished with five interceptions and 12 broken-up passes, the latter tying him for fourth in school history. “It was amazing doing what I knew I could do all along,” Ivory said. After his collegiate career, Ivory tried out for multiple NFL teams. But, unlike Gocong and Beck, his football experience concluded at the end of his senior year. “For any athlete that plays at a high level, it’s an adjustment,” he said. “Because for so many years, you see yourself as just a football player. And so now you can’t do it anymore
— nobody has chosen you to do it any more — and you can wallow.” Instead, Ivory fell back on his degree — which happened to be from one of the highest rated Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering departments in the nation. “I’ve gone professional,” he said. “I just haven’t gone professional with sports.” An early job was with Boeing as a shop floor industrial engineer. But after seven months, he was moved to a temporary project in Italy. Ivory decided he liked Europe, so as Boeing prepared to bring him back to the states, he landed a job in France with Rolls Royce and eventually Jaguar Land Rover in England, working his way up to management in automotive. Today he has homes in England and Germany as he works as head of supply chain operations for Lilium, a company that
Karl Ivory poses for a photo at the London Bridge. Ivory currently has homes in England and Germany.
is developing an all-electric, vertical-takeoff air taxi. “I’ve been in Europe since ’09 – which was only supposed to be six months!” he said. “I’m so thankful I got a call from a coach to go to Cal Poly.” Despite Ivory’s classroom challenges, mentors said they knew he had the ability. “I saw lots of potential in Karl but knew it wasn’t reflected in his coursework and would take a few years to fully develop,” Colvin said. “Often the ‘C’ students who have diverse interests and responsibilities are the ones who continue to mature and develop themselves long after their time at Cal Poly.” Foster was noticeably touched when she learned that Ivory had become successful – and had cited her as an influence. “It’s beyond wonderful,” she said. “To hear all this stuff he’s done, I’m so proud.” n
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The TIMEs
Hammer Time Cal Poly IME students designed two hammers for the Steel Founders’ Society of America’s Cast in Steel 2021 Competition. Below right: A large part of the competition is using animation software to design the “gating” — pathways for the molten metal to fill the cavity in the mold during the casting process.
Cast in Steel competition offers IME students a chance to compete in the fine art of metal casting
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hile enjoying the educational opportunities of applying modern software to a 5,000-year-old art, industrial engineering senior Cole Pike sees a definite drawback to designing, casting and assembling ancient steel weapons like a large Bowie knife or a massive hammer. “One project I was definitely not allowed to bring on campus,” Pike said with a laugh. “The other one I can. Hopefully, the hammer won’t make anyone freak out.” Pike and a team of industrial engineering students will take that chance on campus when they test their creation, Thor’s Hammer, in preparation for the Steel Founders’ Society of America’s Cast in Steel 2021 competition. Cast in Steel 2021 pits collegiate teams from the United States, Canada and Mexico in a competition focused on the use of modern casting computer power to design and produce a functioning weapon or tool based on an historic design. Each team will be eligible for three awards: Best Design and Process as presented in the technical report; Best Project Video documenting the project; and Best Performance based on testing and expert evaluation. After featuring Bowie knives in 2020, the focus of Cast in Steel
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“This project takes into consideration functional design, performance and manufacturability. There’s also the combination of the industrial manufacturing process and an artistic element.” — Rob Carter | IME Lecturer
2021 is Thor’s Hammer, a heavy mallet that can weigh up to six pounds and reach 20 inches in length. Pike, current president of the newly-formed Cal Poly student chapter of the American Foundry Society, said the competition is a great way to learn the entire spectrum of metal casting skills. “These are great projects because they make you complete all the steps of making something, everything from concept generation to final product,” Pike said. “For those of us who have done the competition project both years, we’ve gotten much more involved in every aspect, from the design process, the gating simulation process and the casting process. That’s only made the experience more educational. We’re definitely better prepared for the competition from an education perspective.” Industrial and manufacturing engineering lecturer and team mentor Rob Carter agrees. “This project takes into consideration functional design, performance and manufacturability,” said Carter. “There’s also the combination of the industrial manufacturing process and an artistic element.” Carter, who teaches introductory casting skills in IME 141 (Manufacturing Processes: Net Shape), said the design of the gating system — the pathways the metal flows through as it fills the cavity in the mold — is a large part of the project. “The gating and feeding system design is vitally important and the students are running a state-of-the-art animation software before committing a final design,” he said. “Then the students will run
Testing the hammerhead for density is part of the process for the student teams competing in the Cast in Steel 2021 Competition. Below left: Manufacturing engineering student Arina Poggioli works to attach the hammerhead to an oak handle.
solidification software to perfect the process.” Carter said final casting for the project, which is sponsored by American Casting Co. (Hollister, Calif.) and Aurora Casting & Engineering (Santa Paula, Calif.), will be done off campus due to safety concerns. “We rarely cast steel at Poly because it requires extreme heat — 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit — and because steel has a fair amount of carbon in it, when it burns it shoots sparks everywhere,” he said. “But working with our industry partners on the casting is actually a benefit to the students because they will be exposed to the practices of a successful working foundry.” Pike said the rest of the assembly, which includes a leatherwrapped wooden handle and an embedded coin, would be done on campus. And because Cast in Steel 2021 is a virtual competition, the testing will be done in a Cal Poly lab, too. “In my imagination, this will end up being very beautiful,” he said, “at least to those of us who designed it.” n For more information on the Steel Founder’s Society of America’s 2020 Cast in Steel competition, see: https://www.sfsa.org/castinsteel/?page=foundation
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The TIMEs Summer Undergraduate Research Program
SURP Projects Look to Improve Both Work and Play Industrial engineering student Vanessa Veto is working on a SURP project that concentrates on managing playing time in youth sports.
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IME students tackle playing time in youth sports, better distribution of Cal Poly Wine and helping researchers with health data
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hen her daughter was playing basketball in the YMCA’s youth sports program, Nianpin Chen noticed that some players weren’t getting much time on the court. “Research shows that equal or fair playing time is one of the most prominent issues in youth sports,” said Chen, a lecturer in the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Department. “The prevalence of conflicts regarding playing time allocation and its importance indicate the need for a solution that optimizes playing time.” Her solution, using goal programming, was the focus of a project that helped two undergraduates get valuable, real-world experience in the 2020 Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) — and it was designed help coaches ensure their underused players get more playing time. Supported by donors and money from the dean’s discretionary fund, SURP expands hands-on, real-world opportunities for newer students, pairing them with faculty and industry to conduct research over the summer. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 SURP projects were conducted remotely. “I was interested in this project because it combines two passions of mine: industrial engineering and youth sports,” said Vanessa Veto, one of two students working on Chen’s project. “It was a fantastic opportunity to work closely with a professor and a peer on a real-world application of what we learn in the classroom.” Veto said the model they used ensures youth will have more equal playing time. And their solutions would be easily accessible to coaches through a website they developed during the project. “This is going to make a huge difference for youth sports coaches,” said Veto, an industrial engineering major. “It can be extremely difficult and time-consuming for them to plan a lineup and substitution schedule for each game that ensures equal playing time. Furthermore, conflicts can arise when parents or players perceive the allocation of playing time to be unfair.” In the end, Veto said SURP provided her with enhanced Learn by Doing experience.
“This project can also help guide my career choices because it is giving me more in-depth exposure to operations research, a branch of industrial engineering,” Veto said. To read more on this project, see: https://surp. calpoly.edu/2020/optimization-of-playing-timeallocation-in-youth-sports/
Improving the Cal Poly Wine Supply Chain and Distribution Operations In the wine business, what starts by growing, harvesting and fermenting grapes finishes with selling, delivery and customer service. Coinciding with the Cal Poly Wine and Viticulture Department’s plans to launch a new era later this year with the opening of the Justin and J. Lohr Center for Wine and Viticulture, the department also hopes to implement a state-of-the-art e-commerce sales and distribution process. A SURP project mentored by professor Mohamed Awwad and including industrial engineering students Hannah Casper and Allison Jung, and engineering management graduate student Aria Saberi, focused on providing a solution to some of the problems faced by Cal Poly Wine’s growing business. After conducting a literature review of successful blockchain systems in the food and beverage sector, the team then compared that to the department’s current manual processes and data management
systems used to complete and ship orders of Cal Poly Wine Club wine. The team then suggested a clear supply chain solution the department. “For this project, I was able to apply some of the skills from my Data Analytics experience in order to design a process to automate part of Cal Poly Wine’s distribution,” Casper said. “My work on this SURP project focused on the automation portion, researching and designing the blockchain framework that would best fit this case, and the methodology to construct blockchain powered supply chain for Cal Poly Wine.” To read more on this project, see: https://surp.calpoly.edu/2020/improving-the-cal-poly-wine-supplychain-and-distributions-operations/
Project Aims to Help Researchers Collect Data from Personal Devices Runners and walkers on the street. Cyclists on the backroads or bikers in the hills. If they’re wearing a personal health device like a Fitbit or Apple Healthkit, these athletes are generating a huge data set that remains elusive to researchers studying human physiology because there is a lack of standardization for patient-generated health data (PGHD). Sponsored by Evidation Health and mentored by professors Roy Jafari (industrial engineering) and Paul Anderson (computer science and software engi-
neering), industrial engineering student Erik Ramazzini and biomedical engineering student Ally Lai worked on a project that tasked the team with researching, developing, and documenting a software tool to help tackle this problem. The team’s approach was to create a standardized data structure for a small section of the data set — daily heart rate data from both Fitbit and Apple HealthKit — and then design a modular, scalable software tool which allows standardization methods to be adapted to other sources of PGHD. “As diversity and quantity of available PGHD quickly expands, there is no shortage of paths you could take to make this type of data more accessible for research purposes,” the students wrote in their conclusion. “Thus, we were excited to hear that this work will be continued as a senior project for the IME department in the coming year. Data analytics is becoming more and more prominent in a technologically-advanced world, making projects in this field incredibly beneficial in preparing students for industry.” n To read more on this project, see: https://surp. calpoly.edu/2020/optimization-of-playing-timeallocation-in-youth-sports/
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The TIMEs
Teaching to the Pandemic
IME faculty and students tackle challenges posed by COVID-19 “We’re always trying to solve some problem for the community, whether it’s COVID or anything else. We can have students engaged with the community and see the power of Learn by Doing.” — Xuan Wang | IME Professor
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efore the next group of students arrives for his welding lab, Kevin Williams attaches a harness to his body, then adjusts the GoPro camera now stuck to his torso. “Strap up,” he says, snapping the harness in place. “Body cam, baby!” While his lab is one of the few examples of in-person learning at Cal Poly this quarter, many of his students have chosen to take the course virtually. So Williams — who was using up to five devices at a time to teach entirely virtual, synchronous courses in March of 2020 — still records hands-on work for those taking his lab asynchronously. And the GoPro videos, as he demonstrates on an iPad, come out clear and unobstructed. “If you can strap that camera on, it’s a one and done,” he said. “It’s very vivid.” His point-of-view tutorials represent one of the creative ways IME faculty have adapted to the pandemic, both through in-person and virtual courses. When campus closed due to county-wide sheltering orders in March of 2020, faculty campus-wide had to quickly adjust to an entirely virtual format.
“Strap up. Body cam, baby!” — Kevin Williams | IME 142 Instructor
But several IME faculty members were quick to incorporate the pandemic challenge into their courses, testing the ability of engineers to address major issues of the day. “We’re always trying to solve some problem for the community, whether it’s COVID or anything else,” said Xuan Wang, an associate professor. “We can have students engaged with the community and see the power of Learn by Doing.” When his Product-Process Design course began in the spring of 2020, he asked his students how they might be able to help people during the pandemic. One of his students, Cristian Sion, quickly got to work making N95 respiration masks for health care workers in San Luis Obispo after a physician informed him that existing masks had flaws. “During testing, several doctors and nurses noted that it was difficult to breathe
using the original design,” said Sion, who has since graduated. “I helped increase the filter size by 50 percent.” Wang’s course is a very heavy hands-on one. But luckily, some of Wang’s students, like Sion, had 3D printers, and Wang had access to printers on campus, which allowed each team to design projects that could be built. Other teams designed a buckle for mask straps; portable handles people could use on doors, grocery baskets and carts to avoid direct contact; a face shield; and protective, disposable screens for ATM machines. “COVID, I think, was a perfect project for remote students,” Wang said. While Wang’s students designed individual products, Mohamed Awwad’s Facilities Planning and Design course designed facilities to help with solving COVID-19 problems. “Among the six projects was a project in
Maxwell Ferrer (manufacturing engineering) and Vivian Knudsen (mechanical engineering) work on their metal cutting skills with an oxy-acetylene torch in IME 142—Manufacturing Processes: Materials Joining.
which students designed a facility to handle COVID patients’ overflow in SLO County,” Awwad said. “Another team designed a drive-thru COVID testing facility located on the Cal Poly campus. A third team worked on a project in which they designed a facility for manufacturing ventilators.” Meanwhile, his Supply Chain and Logistics Management course had students write and publish scholarly papers focused on studying and analyzing the impact the pandemic has had on the logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing industries. In the winter 2021 quarter, students have continued to write papers with a COVID-19 focus. (Read more on page 14) “Two project teams focus on researching and analyzing the vaccine supply chain both globally and on the state level,” Awwad said. The virtual components have shown that students are flexible, adaptive and resilient, he said. “I learned that virtual teaching doesn’t have to be a lower quality teaching mode,” he said. “But all of us, faculty and students, have to put some effort into making the experience better for everyone.” Limited in-person learning did resume in the fall. But those courses required adjustments as well – from strict sanitation protocols and social distancing requirements to smaller class sizes and having to communicate through masks. “Communicating can be trying,” Williams said. “But I taught sailing for ten years before I did this, and I have a loud and obnoxious voice, apparently.” Even with adjustments, most students still crave at least some in-person learning. “It’s really important just to keep learning by doing because eventually we have to go back into the workforce,” said industrial engineering student Gianna Nobili. “And we need to know how to do in not just in theory but in practice.” As a teaching assistant for Martin Koch’s Manufacturing Processes lab, Nobili helped sanitize gear students wore when casting metal. But despite the inconvenience, she was glad to be back. “I’m very happy to be on campus. I’m happy to see faces,” she said. “It’s nice again to have some routine to keep me going.” n
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The TIMEs
The Future of Work New Viasat Lab will help Cal Poly students adapt workforce to COVID
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s Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering students prepare for careers that will likely be impacted by COVID-19, a newly sponsored lab will help them adapt workforces to the unique challenges posed by the pandemic. The Viasat Advanced IME Lab will be supported with $125,000 that will fund hardware, software and senior projects over the next five years. The gift will also support faculty professional development and research. The lab, located in room 240 of Building 192, is sponsored by Viasat Inc., a global communications company based near San Diego. Given the technical and economic challenges posed by the pandemic, Dan Waldorf, chair of the IME Department, said the donation comes at a time when students need to be trained to face changing work environments and demands. “During COVID and into the future, the ability to collect, analyze and make decisions based on large amounts of data will be extremely important for many, many fields, including healthcare services, manufacturing and distribution logistics, and development of new technology products,” Waldorf said. “Industrial engineers solve the business problems of improved operations in these fields using the methods of data analytics and an integration of smart data-capturing devices. The Viasat lab sponsorship will make sure we stay up to date in these fields and that our students and faculty have the resources to learn by doing relevant projects — including senior projects, course projects, research projects and masters projects.” The lab focuses on industrial engineering, which seeks to optimize processes.
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“We design supply chain systems here,” Waldorf said. “We design facilities for operation. We deal with analytics and apply them so we can make better decisions in operations systems. And we also work with industrial ‘internet of things’ and automation and the new generation of devices and equipment that need to be optimized and efficient for the future.” Viasat, a longtime Cal Poly supporter, currently employs over 120 Cal Poly graduates, making the university a key pipeline for Viasat talent. “By continuing to support the education of students at Cal Poly, we are setting them up for success in industry, including here at Viasat,” said Riley Elliot, an industrial engineering manager, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly and is a member of the Industry Advisory Board representing Viasat. Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing approach has been particularly useful for Viasat careers, said Brandon Lobb, a university recruiter at Viasat. “Part of Viasat’s culture is that we are intellectually curious, tolerate ambiguity, and are always striving for a better way,” Lobb said. “We face challenges that do not always have a clear process or answer. Similarly, Cal Poly students often are encouraged to take on new problems and work to find new ways to solve them.” Dylan Moreland, an industrial engineering student, is currently working on a senior project sponsored by Viasat that has clear real-world applications. Specifically, Moreland is working on creating a location tracking system to help Viasat with its inventory management. “They’ve tasked us with building an easy-to-use dash-
Industrial Engineering student Dylan Moreland is working on a Viasatsponsored project in the Global Automatic Identification Technologies Lab.
board — a visual representation of the factory floor — so they can see, at a glance, where all the product is,” Moreland said. Moreland will create a mock manufacturing process in the lab to test the dashboard “so we can validate our solutions and make sure they work in San Diego.” Meanwhile, Mohamed Awwad, an assistant professor in the department, said the support will help him and students explore research ranging from investigating new technologies to developing responses to COVID-19 challenges on global supply chains and our daily lives. “Many of those students could present their work at international conferences,” Awwad said. “And some will continue to publish their research in the coming months.” In the past, Viasat has also supported the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department. It has also partnered with student organizations to hold events and provide mentorship, and this summer it partnered with the Cal Poly Alumni Association to host and sponsor the San Diego alumni chapter’s networking mixer. Viasat is also a member of the College of Engineering’s Corporate Dean’s Club. n
“We design supply chain systems here. We design facilities for operation. We deal with analytics and apply them so we can make better decisions in operations systems.” — Dan Waldorf | IME Chair
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Research in the Tim In IME 417, students study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the supply chain. Key finding: It’s constantly evolving
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required class for both industrial and manufacturing engineering students that’s offered every quarter, IME 417 allows students to research the supply chain and logistics management of industries critical to the global and local economy that are virtually ripped from the current headlines. How current? Professor Mohamed Awwad’s IME 417 winter quarter students are studying the supply chain logistics of bringing COVID-19 vaccines to California. “This quarter we have two teams taking a holistic approach to looking at the different challenges to the vaccine supply chain in California — everything from the development and manufacture of the vaccines, the
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government’s role in management of the distribution and finally, getting it into people’s arms,” Awwad said. “Overall, what we are trying to do is capture the response of the supply chain logistics and manufacturing industries in the state and how they are responding to the pandemic.” Since spring of 2020 when COVID-19 forced Cal Poly classes off campus and online, Awwad said the students have found the dramatic disruptions in the global supply chain brought on by the pandemic are evolving about as fast as the variants to the coronavirus. “Since we started on-line learning from home in spring of 2020, it quickly became apparent the situation is rapidly evolving,” he said. “The findings the students reached during spring quarter had changed a lot by the fall. Perhaps the No.1 finding of our research is the situation is evolving quickly and continuously.” Another thread running through the research is COVID-19’s ability to infect the supply chain with different symptoms for each company, in effect picking winners and losers. “Different industries responded to the pandemic in different ways,” Awwad said. “The pandemic had a tremendously bad effect on some types of businesses. For example, we looked at the shortages in the meat industry and the disinfectant industry. From our analysis, interviews and surveys, we found they were not prepared to respond to the disaster. On the other hand, it was interesting to us that some industries to some extent
me of Coronavirus benefitted from the pandemic. Even if the response was slow at the beginning, some industries have grown in terms of profit.” Profit has also prompted another pandemic phenomenon — re-shoring. “Supply chain disruptions have caused government and industries to initiate re-shoring efforts — bringing most of the supply chain back to U.S. soil. Many American companies are now trying to bring most of their supply chain back because the pandemic completely shut down some areas of the globe.” Despite limitations caused by COVID-19, Awwad’s said his students have been successful in publishing their research (see sidebar). “The research has been on point and the feedback we have been getting from the conferences is that we have a great start but we have to build on it,” he said. “So, we always continue to build on the research we did before because the situation is always evolving.”
IME Students Shine at Industry Conferences Every quarter, student researchers in Awwad’s IME 417 class submit papers to industry conferences and they are starting a remarkable track record of success. At the 5th North American Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM) last August, Cal Poly students presented five papers and finished first, second and third in the supply chain competition. The winning teams included: 1st Place — Hana Chitgari, Jorden Carroll, Gudrun Derickson, Sarah McRory, Karlyn Tremaine and Mohamed Awwad authored A Cross-Industry Study Identifying Enabling Factors of Supply Chains that Successfully Responded to COVID-19. 2nd Place — Camille Garlick, Mitchell McMillan, Roxanne Peterson, Timothy Scheuermann, Kyle Smith and Mohamed Awwad authored Case Study Review of the Effects of COVID-19 on the Supply Chain of Manufactur-
ing Companies in California. 3rd Place — Louis Tran, Michael Thomas Bobke and Mohamed Awwad (Cal Poly); Christian Thomas Nis Nissen (University of Applied Sciences Munich); and Niklaus Bendicht Bangerter (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts) authored Disinfectant Shortage: A Multi-country Comparison of Breweries and Distilleries Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Awwad’s students also had two papers published at the 2020 Annual Conference of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers in November, and seven papers published at the 3rd International Conference on Industrial & Mechanical Engineering and Operations Management, a virtual conference held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on December 26-27, 2020. Because of the large time difference with Bangladesh, Awwad said the IME students showed unusual dedication to the class. “Since Bangladesh is 14 hours ahead of California, December 26 is December 25 here, so some students had to present their papers at night on Christmas day. I greatly appreciated that!” n
“Supply chain disruptions have caused government and industries to initiate re-shoring efforts — bringing most of the supply chain back to U.S. soil. Many American companies are now trying to bring most of their supply chain back because the pandemic completely shut down some areas of the globe.” — Mohamed Awwad | IME Professor
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