Students in Dave Kohlmann’s Work Planning and Methods Development class participated in a unique lab experiment to learn about incentive programs: they built, and then ate, tacos! Incentive programs are often used in manufacturing to improve production and/or reduce costs, and students were able to put such programs to work in a real-life experiment. During the lab, students created a process to make tacos, improve upon the process and then measure improvements in terms of time saved.
Students took away several key issues from the class, including how to create a process and measure it, how to create an incentive program and justify their selection, how to identify advantages and disadvantages of incentive programs and how to think on their feet.
Dave Kohlmann is an industrial engineering instructor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He is uniquely qualified to teach this course; he uses many of the processes and models he teaches in his full-time job as an Air Operations Gateway Manager with UPS. He manages UPS’ air operations at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell Airport and has extensive experience in the areas of work measurement, process improvement, time study, facilities layout and various cost analysis. He has worked with UPS for 34 years.
According to Kohlmann, “I’ve found that students become more engaged with the learning process when they can participate in the class. The bonus with this experiment is, of course, getting to eat the tacos!”