Curriculum Information

Development of a technical EEE project
• The project will enable students to realise the importance of effective teamwork and planning. It will require them to formulate satisfactory technical solutions to relatively complex problems, taking account of any social, environmental and ethical issues, that include Risk Assessment at the heart of the development.
• Students will be expected to work as part of a team. The management structure of the team will be determined by the team according to a Belbin analysis.
• The student will have to clearly define the need in terms of specifications, and to draw up a project plan of work that will achieve the stated objectives or milestones.
• Product life cycles and associated models. Impact on product pricing.
• Regular review meetings to review and evaluate progress against an agreed plan including clearly defined milestones, resource requirements and appropriate role allocation.
• On completion of the project, the student will give an oral presentation of their solutions, and produce a fully documented report.

The Business Organisation and the Environment.
• Engineering Project lifecycle models
• Strategic planning- SWOT analysis, external and internal influences on business performance, alternative strategic approaches.
• Business Ethics: Corporate social responsibilities i.e., the engineer’s responsibility to society.
• Business Economics.
• Barriers to entry, including technological barriers. Supply and demand scenarios; concept of elasticity; production costing and economies of scale.
• Marketing and sales: the marketing mix. Market segmentation. Brand development and its importance.
• Promotional techniques. Sales management and customer relationship management.
• Financial and Management Accounting: Accrual and depreciation principles in financial statements, and introduction to P&L and Balance Sheets. Interpretation of financial statements and identification of key variables.
• Operations management.
• The importance of intellectual property and technology development in strategy development.
• Quality management and use of statistical methods, including an introduction to statistical Process Control (SPC) and Design of Experiments. Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP). An introduction to the raw material Supply Chain and Value Stream Mapping.
• Production layouts (product, process and group layouts) and cell organisation algorithms. Optimising product mix with manufacturing constraints.
• Project Management
• Introduction to project planning and project management techniques. Network diagrams, Gantt charts, critical path analysis.
• Legal obligations. Contract law, copyright. Patents, design registration and trade mark protection, compliance with EC Directives, including introduction to waste management and equipment energy use directives.