Helping students gain some close to real-world experience is precisely the goal of the Materials Handling Student Design Competition, which was started by the College-Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CIC/MHE) in 1994.
Since then, nearly 100 design teams have participated in the competition, coming up against such diverse challenges as improving the efficiency at a nonprofit recycling center to developing a plan for fast food chains to handle an array of packaged flour products.
That real-world experience is invaluable, given that a fair percentage of participants in the competition go on to pursue careers designing distribution centers. Usher, for example, says that some 50% of the students in his program go to work for UPS.
This year, eleven teams from engineering schools across the country designed a new distribution center and devised a strategy for shoe retailer Sneaky Sneakers. They were assigned a case that resembles the kind of issues many real-world companies are experiencing today: An expected increase in business due to a plan to begin selling product to consumers directly over an Internet site (see the design challenge, below, for a detailed description).
Virginia Tech’s Dr. Russell Meller, who was an advisor to the team who took home first prize this year, used the case as part of the curriculum for a facilities design and materials handling course he teaches. “It’s a great experience for the students,” he says. “It is also fascinating for me to see the thought process evolve. Although I must admit it’s sometimes a struggle to not put in my two cents!”
As far as the actual judging, the criteria seem straightforward. Students are told that they will be judged on the effectiveness of product flow, equipment and space utilization, the operational plan, and overall integration. But determining what is number one out of five good entries is diabolically difficult, says Usher, who uses the cases himself in an undergraduatelevel industrial engineering course.
“What I look for first and foremost is, ‘If I were the person buying the system, did they sell me on their concept and do sufficient analysis to back it up?”
The winning entries this year all did just that. In the pages that follow, we take a look at the five top award winners—diverse in their approach to equipment selection, facility design, equipment investment, and operating costs. To put things into perspective, the capital equipment outlay ranged from under $1M to $8.5M—and that’s just for starters!