Industrial & Systems Engineering Department Seminar:

Operational Excellence / Lean 6-Sigma vs Industrial & Systems Engineering

Friday, February 24th | 11:30 AM-12:30 PM ET
Hybrid - MANU 2150 (in person) or via Zoom (virtual)

Seminar by: Jack Feng, Ph.D., IISE Fellow, and Master Black Belt
Vice President of Operational Excellence, Superior Industries International

Abstract

Lean (including its earlier names such as Just in Time, Toyota Production System) and Six Sigma have outlasted and impacted many other operations management buzzwords worldwide, in industries, and in the academy.  There is no indication it is going away anytime soon by simply looking at the many industry-belting programs, official corporate titles from Lean Six Sigma to Operational Excellence to Continuous Improvement, more and more consulting companies, and book publications on this topic every year.  Yet, there seem to be some misconceptions from the academic community about the implementation side of Lean Six Sigma. For example, why do industries invest so much to train their own Black Belts when we graduate thousands of industrial and systems engineers?  Why do most companies have an officer in charge of Lean Six Sigma deployment?  What are the typical Lean Six Sigma deployment models?  What are the benefits of having a dedicated Lean Six Sigma deployment team?  This seminar intends to give you the speaker’s perspective on the above questions.  Dr. Jack Feng is uniquely suited to answer these questions as he has worked full-time in the academy and corporate America as well as a consultant before he joined Corporate America.  

Biography

Jack Feng is an IISE Fellow and Caterpillar Trained Master Black Belt. He is currently the Vice President of Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement at Superior Industries, the largest auto wheel manufacturer in North America and West / Central Europe.  Prior to joining Superior, he served similar leadership roles at Commercial Vehicle Group and Caterpillar, where he served leadership roles in Caterpillar Production Systems (CPS) deployment at the corporate level, Asia Pacific regional level, and the divisional level including as Dean of Six Sigma, Quality and Safety / Health / Environment and as the Asia Pacific President of Caterpillar University. He won the first Caterpillar China Team Collaboration Award.  He was a tenured Professor of Industrial Engineering at Bradley University and an Assistant Professor at Penn State.  At Bradley, he won the Young Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Scholarship and the first College of Engineering Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Scholarship.

His consulting business has solved many practical problems for Boeing, Caterpillar, Deere, and The University of Illinois College of Medicine to name a few.  He has published 100+ books, book chapters, conference papers, and journal articles in IISE Transactions, IEEE Transactions, SME Journal of Manufacturing Systems, and ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering.  He served as the President of IISE Central Illinois Chapter for 10+ years, and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Production Research for 15+ years. Recently, he co-authored a chapter on Operational Excellence & Six 6-Sigma in Emerging Frontiers in Industrial and Systems Engineering (CRC Press 1999), and in the 6th Edition of Maynard’s Industrial and Systems Engineering Handbook (McGraw-Hill: in press).  He has been serving on the Council for Industrial and Systems Engineering (CISE) and Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) of IISE since 2017, as well as the Industrial Advisory Board in Industrial Engineering for 4 years on behalf of Caterpillar at The University of Iowa, where he got his PhD and MS degrees.

Connect with Jack on LinkedIn