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MicroMasters®

Principles of Manufacturing

MicroMasters®

Principles of Manufacturing

Develop the fundamental skills needed for global excellence in manufacturing and competitiveness with the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters Credential, designed and delivered by MIT’s #1-world ranked Mechanical Engineering department. Build your career with the credential or use it as credits towards a Master’s Degree by applying to MIT’s world-renowned Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design Blended Program.

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This program provides students with a fundamental basis for understanding and controlling rate, quality and cost in a manufacturing enterprise.

The Principles of Manufacturing are a set of elements common to all manufacturing industries that revolve around the concepts of flow and variations. These principles have emerged from working closely with manufacturing industries at both the research and operational levels.

Targeted towards graduate-level engineers, product designers, and technology developers with an interest in a career in advanced manufacturing, the program will help learners understand and apply these principles to product and process design, factory and supply chain design, and factory operations.

This curriculum focusses on the analysis, characterization and control of flow and variation at different levels of the enterprise through the following subject areas:

  • Unit Process Variation and Control: Modeling and controlling temporal and spatial variation in unit processes
  • Factory Level System Variation and Control: Modeling and controlling flows in manufacturing systems with stochastic elements and inputs.
  • Supply Chain – System Variation and Control: How to operate and design optimal manufacturing-centered supply chains.
  • Business Flows: Understanding the uses and flow of business information to start up, scale up and operate a manufacturing facility.

Required Courses

What you'll learn

  • A new perspective for design and operational decision making at all levels of manufacturing, in the context of volume manufacturing, where rate, quality, cost and flexibility are the key metrics
  • How to operate and control unit processes to ensure maximum quality using basic and advanced statistical and feedback control methods
  • How to design and operate systems of processes with optimal capacity, resilience and inventory
  • How to design and operate optimal supply chain systems

Meet your instructors

  • Featured image for Jung-Hoon Chun
    Professor of Mechanical Engineering
  • Featured image for Abbott Weiss
    Senior Lecturer, Supply Chain Management
  • Featured image for Stephen Graves
    Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management
  • Featured image for Sean Willems
    Haslam Chair in Supply Chain Analytics at University of Tennessee
  • Featured image for David Hardt
    Ralph E. and Evelyn F. Cross Professor of Mechanical Engineering
  • Featured image for Duane Boning
    Co-Director, MIT Leaders for Global Operations Program
  • Featured image for Stanley B. Gershwin
    Senior Research Scientist
  • Featured image for Brian Anthony
    Associate Principle Research Scientist

Who can take this course?

Because of U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) restrictions and other U.S. federal regulations, learners residing in one or more of the following countries or regions will not be able to register for this course: Iran, Cuba, North Korea and the Crimea, Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic regions of Ukraine.