Professor Louis Freund, San José State University, USA

22-11-2006

10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

Faculty of Engineering, Seminar Room EA-06-03, NUS

As the US economy heads toward a services basis, many employers, including those traditionally thought of as “manufacturing companies”, are now seeking engineering and business graduates with academic background in SSME. In addition, the management of services companies, which have become global in the past 20 years, now requires technical and management personnel familiar with the special features of providing world class services. This talk will review the foundations for this expanding orientation and highlight a few of the distinguishing features of SSME as an academic discipline. In addition, the presentation will discuss steps that an interdisciplinary faculty team at SJSU from the Colleges of Business, Engineering, Applied Sciences and Arts, and Science are taking to address this need.

Louis E. Freund is Professor and Chair at Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering, San José State University. He received his BS and MS in Industrial Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO USA and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He served on the full time faculty at the University of Missouri – Columbia from 1971-75, and joined the ISE Department at San Jose State University in 1986. He became Department Chair in 2001. Between 1975 and 1986 Dr. Freund held various industry positions generally in the field of the application of Industrial Engineering methodologies in hospitals and other health care delivery facilities. He specialized in the area of nurse staffing for inpatient units, developing a measure of patient acuity and nursing workload based on assignment difficulty. Since joining SJSU, he has continued his consulting practice in the areas of health care systems productivity, systems simulation, workplace ergonomics, and statistical process control. He is a Fellow in the Institute of Industrial Engineers and is currently is serving IIE as a National Vice President for Technical Networking. He also is currently chairing a sub-committee of the Council of Industrial Engineering Academic Department Heads (CIEADH) that is designing and implementing a new (global) “Innovations in Curriculum” award this year. He is a recipient of an IBM 2006 Faculty Award in the area of services science, management, and engineering.