Undergraduate Industrial Engineering Majors’ Software Preferences for Solving Statistical Process Control and Operations Research Questions

Abstract

Various software packages can be used by engineering students to solve problems for Statistical Process Control (i.e. SPC) and Operations Research (i.e. OR) applications. These software packages require learning and implementing programming languages that help students to understand application insights of data visualization, statistical distributions, diagrams and charts, and regression and correlation analysis in SPC, and linear programming, integer programming, non-linear programming, Markov chains and linear algebra in OR. Instructors teaching OR or SPC courses can focus on a single software package or several software packages for teaching applications of various concepts in each one of these courses however students' computer programming preference could be different. The choice of software to be taught is important for ease of OR and SPC applications and how much students are comfortable using the corresponding software package. Students' software preference could change depending on the OR and SPC concepts covered, therefore extensive knowledge of software related to above mentioned concepts covered in OR and SPC courses strengthens users' knowledge and ability to make a software choice depending on the concept covered. In this work, qualitative and quantitative analysis of Industrial Engineering (IE) undergraduate students' software choices to solve various OR and SPC questions will be presented with their computer programming ranking for solving these questions as a part of the OR and SPC courses. The software packages compared by the students included Excel, SPSS and R for SPC, and Excel-Solver, Matlab and Lingo for OR.