Defects Identification and Assessment in Engineering Education Using Lean Tools

Abstract

Today, lean philosophy is widely used in many manufacturing and service systems to reduce or eliminate waste and defects for improving system quality. Recently, Lean Engineering Education (LEE) is a new concept lean philosophy and widely used in education system. Engineering education is so important field where practical and theoretical study have a strong impact to increase students' knowledge and improve their skills. This study will illustrate how can be successfully used Lean tools on the engineering education system by identifying defects that have a negative influence on the final quality of the theoretical and practical studies. E- questionnaire by google form is prepared to collect data about quality of engineering education elements from students point view where it was conducted in mechanical engineering department and included 82 students. Six engineering education elements that have a strong impact on the quality of the theoretical and practical studies are used, namely; lecturer, students, curriculum, assessment process, scientific method and scientific equipment and tools. Lean tools, namely; pareto analysis, fishbone analysis have been used to clarify the defects types and causes of the critical defect in the engineering education that have a big influence on the quality of both studies. weights method is used also to compare between the theoretical and practical studies to identify which one is less quality than another quality scale was used that based on triple Likert scale to identify the quality level; namely bad, acceptable and good. The results showed that both the theoretical and practical study in the mechanical engineering department have the same acceptable level of quality and the scientific equipment and tools have largest defect in the practical study and the unavailable enough number of laboratory devices is considered a critical cause of scientific equipment and tool defects  but  in the theoretical study , the assessment process has largest defects with critical causes result from unclear the assessment questions during examinations