Just as institutions of higher education are increasingly being required to restructure and become more productive, so also is accountability for undergraduate education. A modest beginning is described at Virginia Tech.

(1984). Applied Operations Research and Management Science. Journal of the Operational Research Society: Vol. 35, No. 9, pp. 871-872.

In November and December of 1937, a series of eight lectures was delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston by a practicing executive, Chester I. Barnard. The enthusiastic response to the lectures prompted a decision by the Harvard University Press to publish them in book form under the same title, and in 1938 there appeared The Functions of the Executive (Barnard, 1938). Not only was this series of lectures and the text lauded in 1937 and 1938, the latter has since come to be recognized as a landmark in the evolution of our understanding of organizations.

Higher education is increasingly facing a condition of financial exigency. A number of colleges and universities have closed; almost all have had to curtail their aspirations and make sacrifices in their operations. While the university is big business, it does not readily lend itself to many of the conventional measures of and improvements in productivity. But the industrial engineer can, and indeed must, help higher education. Some of the unique features of the university are treated herein along with recommendations for industrial engineering study.

The job shop may be viewed as a network of queues with each work center then defined as a single or multichannel service facility. In the low volume situation, manufacturing improvements may be expected of each work station. The effect of learning at the service facility will be seen as a reduction of queue congestion and a lessening of unit waiting time. This may eventually lead to excessive idle service capacity or reduced machine utilization. Where there are several machines at each work station, and learning can be expected, a scheme can be developed wherein machines could be released on a schedule to other work assignments while maintaining a relatively constant level of machine utilization.

To compete in today's global economy, organizations are under pressure to improve their product development processes. The engineering design process is an important component of the overall product development process. This research considers the relationship of both social and technical variables to the engineering design process. The theoretical foundation of this research is sociotechnical systems theory. This theory states that optimum performance is achieved by jointly considering the technical and the social subsystems. The application domain of the theory is called macroergonomics. A technical variable considered by this research was engineering design process methodology. Two methodologies were considered: sequential engineering and concurrent engineering. Another technical construct considered by this research was the use of computer- supported cooperative work technology (CSCW) or groupware. The social variable considered by this research was group size. Two sizes were considered: large groups of six people and small groups of three people. This research sought to determine the optimum combination of technical and social variables that would result in highest performance.