Ford, MTU Partnership Ratchets up for 2000
HOUGHTON--Michigan Tech's C3P training partnership with Ford Motor Company is entering its fourth year with 3,000 graduates to its credit and a blueprint to educate thousands more.
Spearheaded by MTU mechanical engineering professor Dr. Ed Lumsdaine, C3P links Ford with faculty from several universities and community colleges in a multi-million-dollar, global retraining effort, with MTU serving as lead institution.
"Ford's vision is to be the best automotive company in the world by the year 2000," Lumsdaine said. And C3P is a part of it.
Through C3P, seven mechanical engineering faculty are involved in training Ford engineers, designers, and suppliers in I-DEAS software. The software incorporates computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, computer-aided engineering, and product information management into a single package--thus the C3P. I-DEAS not only helps all of a project's participants to communicate better, it also allows for concurrent engineering based on solid modeling.
Using traditional software, engineers develop a model using a virtual wire frame and then add a surface. "With solid modeling, you have the surface already," Lumsdaine said. "It's far more powerful and very different."
Both Ford and the Michigan Jobs Commission have renewed their support of C3P, and three new faculty from MTU will join the project, as well as instructors from the other universities and community colleges involved in the partnership.
They'll need the help. "We hope to train 20,000 by the year 2000," Lumsdaine said, adding, "Our classes are full."
Total Ford support for the project administered by MTU now exceeds $2 million, with cumulative Jobs Commission funding at $4.6 million. By the end of 1998-99, Michigan Tech will have received $6.6 million, primarily to support students and faculty involved in the program. "Student teaching assistants have been very valuable to the program," Lumsdaine said. "More than ten MTU students have been involved as classroom teaching assistants."
In addition to MTU, the C3P partnership also includes the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses of the University of Michigan, University of Detroit-Mercy, Kettering University, and Henry Ford, Macomb, Washtenaw, and Oakland community colleges.
"The Board of Control and I are very enthusiastic about this partnership between Ford and Michigan Tech," President Curt Tompkins said. "I applaud Dr. Lumsdaine's leadership in this important project."
Now freshman engineering students at Michigan Tech can benefit from what MTU instructors have learned at Ford. I-DEAS will be part of the course ME105, Geometric Modeling and Engineering Graphics in Design.
"Our goal is to teach engineering students how to be creative in their design," Lumsdaine said. "They have to learn how to innovate. Seventy percent of the cost of a product is fixed when you finish your design, but the design is only 5 percent of the total cost.
"If you introduce innovation and creativity at the design stage, you can have a huge impact on the bottom line."
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08/14/98-MTN109