Tag: Washington State U.

OM in the News: Making Renewable Natural Gas Directly from Waste

A new method for treating sewage sludge from a wastewater treatment plant efficiently created renewable natural gas while reducing the cost of the treatment. The work could help communities sustainably clean up waste while getting renewable natural gas for their energy needs.

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When workers at Washington State U. pretreated sludge collected from a nearby wastewater facility, they produced 200% more renewable natural gas compared to current practices and reduced the final disposal cost by nearly 50%. Renewable natural gas could be used in the same way as fossil-fuel based natural gas for a wide variety of uses, including for electricity generation, home heating, or for transportation without the same climate effect as fossil fuels.

“This technology basically converts up to 80% of the sewage sludge into something valuable,” said Prof. Ahring in WSU Insider (April 21, 2016). The WSU team added a pretreatment step, treating the sludge at high temperature and pressure with oxygen added before the anaerobic digestion process. The small amount of oxygen under high-pressure conditions acts as a catalyst to break down the long polymer chains in the material. The team showed that their pretreatment resulted in reduced cost to treat the sewage from $494 to $253 per ton of dry solids.

“This approach not only enhances carbon conversion efficiency and methane yield but also enables direct production of pipeline-quality renewable natural gas with minimal CO2 content — addressing two major limitations of existing sludge-to-energy systems into a single, scalable methodology,” said Ahring.

Wastewater treatment facilities use large amounts of electricity to clean up municipal wastewater, making up between 3% and 4% of the total electricity demand in the U.S. They are often the largest user of electricity in a small community. Their treatment processes also contribute to global warming, adding about 21 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere annually.

About half of the 15,000 wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. use anaerobic digestion to reduce sewage waste and make biogas, but the process, in which microbes break down the waste, is inefficient and struggles to break down all the complex molecules in the sludge.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is wastewater such an important issue?
  2. Referring to Supplement 5 in your Heizer/Render/Munson text, how does this support the triple bottom line?

OM in the News: Business Students Find Real World Applications for OM Topics

dnaCrime-scene DNA is processed three weeks faster at a state forensic laboratory thanks to internship work by recent Washington State University graduate Kristina Hoffman, writes WSU News (Feb. 3, 2016). A forensic scientist with the Washington State Patrol, she applied “lean” business management practices that resulted in a 26% increase in productivity, $5,200 savings on overtime pay, and reduction in the average turnaround time for processing DNA samples from 93 days to 71.

“The importance and impact are immediately translatable to the public at large,” said the director of the WSU degree program. A DNA sample could help identify a serial criminal who would be arrested 3 weeks sooner, thus making communities safer. Alternately, if you were a suspect in jail awaiting DNA analysis, you time in jail would be shortened by 3 weeks,” she said.

 

For her internship, Hoffman sought to reduce the delay in DNA sample processing by applying the principles of lean management, the topic of Chapter 16, which systematically seeks to achieve small, incremental changes in processes in order to improve efficiency and quality. She enrolled in Lean Agility, one of the WSU professional science master’s courses. At the State Patrol, she incorporated lean principles into various aspects of the workflow, from DNA case assignment to sample analysis to sample result reporting.

In the Lean Agility class, adds our new coauthor, Chuck Munson at WSU, students learn how to minimize problems and maximize productivity. They use statistical and logical techniques to identify and deliver improvements in production and operations management.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Ask students for ideas as to how lean could be used in companies they know.
  2. What are some areas in which lean could be applied at your college?

OM Syllabi: Temple U., Washington State U., Texas Tech U. and Rollins College

Jay and I never cease to be impressed by the variety of ways our colleagues teach OM at their schools.  Some profs spend 2 weeks on LP, others focus on quality and process strategy, while others actually cover all 17 chapters in sequence! We thought you might be interested in how different schools using our text face that challenge. So today we share 4 OM syllabi with you from a wide variety of  schools. Here they are:

Temple University, taught by Howard Weiss, as an undergrad course. MSOM 3101 syllabus. You might note Howard’s use of Excel OM, POM, and MyOMLab in homework assignments.

Texas Tech University, taught by Phillip Flamm, as a large section undergrad course.  ISQS 3344 syllabus. Phillip makes extensive use of “clickers” in his classes, as he noted in his Guest Blog last week.

Washington State University, taught by Chuck Munson, as an undergrad course. Mgt Op 340 syllabus. Note how Chuck integrates The Goal and MyOMLab into his course.

Rollins College, taught by Barry Render, as an MBA core course. POM 503 syllabus. You will notice that I have a lot of guest speakers. I use MyOMLab  for pre-class quizzes, homework, and tests. Because it is a graduate class, there are cases assigned every week.

We invite you to share your OM syllabus with us as well. Just send  it as a Word file or as an internet link to brender@cfl.rr.com.