
Principles of Manufacturing

Program Information
About this Program
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.
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.
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
Courses
To complete this program, you must take 8 required courses.
Required Courses
Meet your instructors
Jung-Hoon Chun
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Jung-Hoon Chun is director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been a member of the MIT Mechanical Engineering faculty since 1989, and has over 100 publications and patents to his credit. His research focuses on the development of Innovative Manufacturing Processes. His research areas include droplet-based manufacturing processes, microelectronics manufacturing processes such as chemical-mechanical polishing and polymer-based microfluidic devices manufacturing. One of his patented manufacturing process, the uniform-droplet spray process, has been commercialized worldwide for the production of solder spheres used in electronics packaging. His teaching focuses on these research areas and on management in engineering. Dr. Chun also has experience in many large-scale international collaborations and industry-MIT consortia. He is active in advising and consulting for many for-profit and non-profit organizations worldwide, in technical as well as policy areas. Dr. Chun received a B.S. from Seoul National University, an M.A.Sc. from the University of Ottawa, and a Ph.D. from MIT, all in mechanical engineering.
Areas of expertise:
- Cu chemical-mechanical polishing
- Continuous manufacturing of pharmaceutical dosage forms
- Effects of technology multiplier on manufacturing