Common Foundations Between Control Engineering and Manufacturing Management

SUMMARY

A number of international studies have suggested that good performance in manufacturing companies is usually correlated with the employment of good quality engineering graduates in senior production management posts. This suggests that engineering courses should be designed with the expectation that many students will be engaged in decision making at the managerial level in situations involving considerable uncertainty. It is therefore important to establish which engineering disciplines provide skills with high potential for ‘carry-over’ into management. The conclusion reached in this paper is that control systems is such a subject, especially as a philosophy can be established in which mathematical models move from the general to the particular.