The College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE) and the Order Fulfillment Council (OFC) announced recently that the University of Arkansas industrial engineering student team won first place in the 2009-2010 Material Handling Student Design Competition beating out 2nd- and 3rd-place teams from Georgia Tech and California Polytechnic State University.

The industrial engineering student team includes Mattie Bookhout, Prabuddha Lohani, Elizabeth McCallion and Cameron Ramoly. Each of these students are excellent representatives of the University of Arkansas and the department of industrial engineering. Bookhout is pursuing a graduate degree at Duke University while McCallion is attending graduate school at Clemson University. Lohani will remain for graduate studies in the department of industrial engineering and Ramoly is expected to complete his Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering in fall 2011.

Faculty adviser Russell D. Meller reported that previous UA teams had ranked second and third, but this was the first successful attempt to take first place.

He added, "This team included some of our best graduates from last year and showed that the University of Arkansas can compete with any university in the country." The competition project was part of Meller's senior-level course on facility logistics.

Each year, the Material Handling Student Design Competition provides student teams with the opportunity to design a manufacturing or distribution facility to support the objectives of a fictional company (case content is drawn from real-world implementations). Actual company names are changed along with some aspects of the data to provide the appropriate challenge to the student teams as well as protecting the identity of the actual company and their products. The 2009-2010 case was developed by Keogh Consulting.; This year’s case study, ToolFair Distributors, has been developed to provide a real-world situation in regard to designing functional and efficient distribution center facilities.

Design projects are judged by the three academic and three industry representatives and are evaluated on the criteria of product flow, equipment selection, space utilization, operational plan, implementation plan, economic justification, overall integration, conclusions, and overall quality of report.

The judges commented that the team used good process solution and analysis and that the strongest part of this entry was its economic justification of its equipment choices. The report was well written; evidence of careful attention to detail that included a good layout of the analysis and method for tackling the appropriate design. According to Meller, "their report was really well written, which is something that I stress throughout the course — selling your design is as important as the design itself — and in this report, they showed both!"