Engineering professor Bohdan W. Oppenheim has received a Fulbright fellowship to teach a specialized form of systems engineering at a university in Warsaw, Poland, during the first semester of 2011.
Bohdan, who has taught at Loyola Marymount University since 1983, will be lecturing on one of his specialties – lean systems engineering – which focuses on creating streamlined management solutions that enhance value and minimize waste in engineering programs.
“Traditionally, engineering has been done effectively in the technical sense but inefficiently,” said Bohdan, who was born in Warsaw and became a U.S. citizens in 1977. “The defense industry had priorities other than program efficiency and productivity, and that impacted our engineering culture.”
Oppenheim is a recognized expert in lean systems and founded and headed the working group focusing on the topic for INCOSE, the International Council on Systems Engineering. The working group, which includes 160 engineers and scientists from industry, government and academia, won the Best Product Award in 2009 from INCOSE.
The product, Lean Enablers for Systems Engineering, is 194 heuristics, or a checklist of “do’s and don’ts” that focus on program or product success through best lean engineering practices and relentless reduction of wasted time and effort in design.
Richard Plumb, dean of the Seaver College of Science and Engineering, said the Fulbright recognizes the cutting-edge research and scholarship being done at LMU. “I congratulate Professor Oppenheim on the award. Sharing his work with fellow scientists in Eastern Europe is a collaboration that reflects the best in scholarship and service,” Plumb said.
The Fulbright program will take place at the Kozminski Academy, a university in Warsaw, and at other universities in Poland. Oppenheim, a native speaker, will lecture in Polish. LMU already has a cooperative program with Kozminski, and Oppenheim, who travels to Poland annually, felt the collaboration around lean systems engineering is a natural and needed one.
“I have taught short courses at Kozminski for the past 15 years and so I know the school,” he said, commenting on the success of his Fulbright Scholar application from his second-floor office in Pereira Hall. “Poland is a fantastic laboratory, and it is the one country in Europe that has had positive growth during the worldwide economic crisis that began in 2007. They also have incredible energy from converting from communism to democracy.”