Is the Sky Falling on Material Handling Education

By Dr. Kevin Gue
CICMHE President 2006-2007

In December, 2006, the Immediate Past President of CICMHE, Dr. Russ Meller of the University of Arkansas, completed a major, CICMHE-sponsored project to assess the current state and likely future of material handling education. The current state offers some things for which we can give thanks, but the long-term future—absent a determined intervention by Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA) and CICMHE—presents significant challenges.

On the positive side, material handling or facilities planning (MH/FP) courses are required in the majority of industrial engineering (IE) departments. This is not the case, however, among the top IE departments, where only 23% have a required course. Material handling and facilities planning have been “replaced,” to some extent, by courses in logistics and supply chain design. Among engineering technology programs, there is more coverage of MH/FP topics. Among Colleges of Business, coverage of “business logistics” seems to be increasing, but material handling is not a significant component in most of these courses.

The sobering part of Meller’s report is his assessment of the trend and possible future of material handling education. I say “possible future” because what I am about to describe is likely to be the result, if MHIA and CICMHE do not take positive steps to effect a different outcome.

Meller’s main conclusion is that “material handling education is at a crossroads, with an uncertain future.” He notes two major developments that could lead to the demise of material handling as a significant component of business and engineering education. First, and perhaps most foreboding, is the dwindling pool of professors with interests in material handling. Right now, material handling is taught as a stand-alone course mainly by professors who have, or have had, an interest in material handling as a research area. Currently, there are fewer such professors, because the traditional sources of federal funding for research (National Science Foundation and the military Offices of Research) have not been funding this type of work. Just as in industry, professors are forced (somewhat) to “follow the money,” and in this case, there isn’t much money in material handling research.

Let me explain that last point a little, because it gives some insight into the deep, dark world of modern academia: Professors start their careers doing research in the areas of their dissertations, and those dissertations usually come from research “projects” of their professors, which are funded by outside agencies. In other words, the source of the money determines, to a large extent, the topics studied by our new (and old) professors. If there is no money for material handling research, then the population of material handling-oriented professors necessarily declines.

Second, and this one is related to the first, material handling is widely viewed as a legacy topic, especially among top IE programs. In the academic world, a legacy topic is one for which the main insights seem already to be known, and which does not seem to have a significant bearing on the performance of industry. Whether or not you agree that material handling is such a topic, this view is widely held among top departments of industrial engineering.

Russ provides in a second report some excellent recommendations for CICMHE and MHIA. For CICMHE: We must develop materials that support professors teaching material handling in non-material handling courses. For example, we should develop 10-minute, 30-minute, and 1-class period modules that introduce business school students to the issues and importance of material handling. These we must aggressively market to professors teaching logistics and supply chain management courses. We must also develop a more coherent and “universally-accepted” design methodology, which would make material handling and its importance more compelling.

How can the Industry help? One of Russ’s recommendations is to promote material handling as an enabling technology. This is done everyday by the Industry to the business world, but we are talking about promoting material handling to the academic world. The Council will be thinking of ways to work with the Industry to this end. Russ’s second recommendation is to establish an endowment for research in material handling. The idea here is to establish a source of research funds specifically targeted at material handling, so that professors can fund Ph.D. students who will someday become the future teachers of material handling.

Space does not allow me to describe how CICMHE is responding to these realities, but trust that we have the message onboard and are actively engaged in shaping a different future. If you are interested in the reports Russ Meller has written, you can contact him directly at rmeller@uark.edu or CICMHE@mhia.org.

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