Department of Industrial and Engineering Management
Departmental Highlights
Prof Ramdass is an Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering with 45 years of experience in both academia and industry. He is passionate about the progress of fellow academics in terms of the development of skills and expertise in the scholarship of teaching and learning and research. As a council member of SAIIE, Prof Ramdass was tasked to start a community engagement project to “give back to the members of SAIIE”. Within two weeks, a presenter was identified, a platform arranged and a title for the first presentation developed.
The first presenter was our very own staff member, Mr Kgabo Mokgohloa, who spoke about value engineering as a systems thinking approach to solving complex problems. He emphasised the symbiotic relationship between value engineering as a hard systems approach and human dynamics as a soft systems approach to driving value. The response to the invitation was overwhelming, with 50 members attending. At the end of the presentation, the members expressed their delight at participating in such an initiative and thanked the SAIIE community for starting this initiative.
The SAIIE community engagement project is now accredited by ECSA, with each attendee being assigned 0.2 CPD points. The president of SAIIE, who is hopeful that this initiative will go from strength to strength, remarked: “I am quite surprised that you were able to pull this off in such a short time and this is why you deserve such an award.” Prof Ramdass said that he was humbled to receive such an award and would continue in his endeavour to ensure that industrial engineering becomes a well-recognised discipline. If industrial engineering were applied to every organisation, productivity, efficiency and effectiveness would improve in all walks of life and the quality of life of all South African citizens would improve dramatically.
Last modified: Mon Aug 07 18:04:24 SAST 2023