Manufacturing Processes and Operations Analysis

IE 272 is where you start thinking like an industrial engineer: looking at a factory floor as a system of people, machines, and materials that can be measured, analyzed, and redesigned rather than just observed. You'll do hands-on labs with traditional manufacturing processes and CAD, run time studies and line-balancing exercises, write short essays on what you're seeing, and build toward a term project simulating a manufacturing system. As a sophomore-fall core, it grounds the rest of the IE curriculum — the operations research, production planning, and simulation courses ahead all assume you've already developed intuition for how physical production actually works.