Session: 09-01-01: Curriculum Innovations, Pedagogy and Learning Methodologies

Paper Number: 68673

Start Time: Monday, 11:25 AM

68673 - Measuring sustainability and operational performance by Engineering Students in University-Business PBL partnerships 

Teaching sustainability is compulsory. Students, particularly, engineering students being designers and developers of systems, processes, and products need to be aware of those developments and decisions impacts in sustainability. Simultaneously, companies are suffering societal pressures to have more sustainable operations and supply chains. This means that Higher Educations Institutions, particularly, Engineering Schools have to prepare students to work in organizations where sustainability is mandatory, that is to say, organizations always searching to be more sustainable. Nevertheless, a lot is needed as will be shown in this paper. This paper presents a study done by fourth-year Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students in university-business Project-Based Learning (PBL) partnerships. The students applied an indicator called Business Overall Performance and Sustainability Effectiveness (BOPSE) which assesses business effectiveness, rooted in operational performance (by means of the overall equipment effectiveness) and on sustainability compliance (by means of the three dimensions of sustainability). This indicator was explained in the context of Lean-Green synergy, a content lectured in the course Production Systems Organization II (PSOII) of the fourth year IEM program of the School of Engineering of the University of Minho. This course is one of the five courses which contents must be integrated into the course Integrated Project of Industrial Engineering and Management II under PBL. Students worked in teams of 6-10 students and developed their projects in companies. The cohort of 2020-21 involved 12 teams in a total of 100 students. In each company, teams had a supervisor that supported and supervised their work. Teams had to organize themselves to attend lectures in university and visit the companies according to companies’ availability. The project to be developed under PBL is related to the analysis and proposals improvements for companies’ production system applying the knowledge and contents learned in courses of fourth or previous years. The assignment described in the context of this paper had four parts: 1) teams used an excel file provided by teachers with indicators for BOPSE calculus; 2) teams identified and collected the data indicators needed to fill the excel file for their company; 3) teams presented results in an A3 report and 4) teams presented results through a 5 minutes presentation to the teachers. Teams should also reflect on the data collection process (e.g. difficulties felt) and the tool used (excel file) and propose improvements to this tool. This improvement was not mandatory. Taking into account the results obtained in the BOPSE indicator, the teams had to propose some environmental and operational improvement actions to increase the BOPSE indicator. The teams’ main findings, the sustainability learning process, and outcomes will be discussed in the paper.

Presenting Author: Anabela Alves University of Minho

Authors:

Anabela C. Alves University of Minho
M. Florentina Abreu University of Minho