Program Overview
Develop the fundamental skills needed for global excellence in manufacturing and competitiveness with the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters Credential, designed and delivered by MIT’s #1-world ranked Mechanical Engineering department.
This program provides students with a fundamental basis for understanding and controlling rate, quality and cost in a manufacturing enterprise.
The Principles of Manufacturing are a set of elements common to all manufacturing industries that revolve around the concepts of flow and variations. These principles have emerged from working closely with manufacturing industries at both the research and operational levels.
Targeted towards graduate-level engineers, product designers, and technology developers with an interest in a career in advanced manufacturing, the program will help learners understand and apply these principles to product and process design, factory and supply chain design, and factory operations.
This curriculum focusses on the analysis, characterization and control of flow and variation at different levels of the enterprise through the following subject areas:
- Unit Process Variation and Control: Modeling and controlling temporal and spatial variation in unit processes
- Factory Level System Variation and Control: Modeling and controlling flows in manufacturing systems with stochastic elements and inputs.
- Supply Chain – System Variation and Control: How to operate and design optimal manufacturing-centered supply chains.
- Business Flows: Understanding the uses and flow of business information to start up, scale up and operate a manufacturing facility.
What you will learn
- A new perspective for design and operational decision making at all levels of manufacturing, in the context of volume manufacturing, where rate, quality, cost and flexibility are the key metrics
- How to operate and control unit processes to ensure maximum quality using basic and advanced statistical and feedback control methods
- How to design and operate systems of processes with optimal capacity, resilience and inventory
- How to design and operate optimal supply chain systems
- The financial underpinnings of a manufacturing enterprise, including new ventures
Program Class List
1Manufacturing Process Control I
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2Manufacturing Systems I
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3Management in Engineering: Accounting and Planning
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4Supply Chains for Manufacturing: Inventory Analytics
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5Manufacturing Process Control II
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6Supply Chains for Manufacturing: Capacity Analytics
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7Manufacturing Systems II
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8Management in Engineering: Strategy and Leadership
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Meet Your Instructors

Stanley B. Gershwin

Sean Willems

Jung-Hoon Chun

Stephen Graves

Duane Boning

David Hardt

Abbott Weiss
About This Course:
Randomness is inherent in all processes including manufacturing. The fundamental concepts taught in this course will help learners develop powerful statistical process control methods that are the foundation of world-class manufacturing quality.
As part of the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters program, this course will introduce statistical methods that apply to any unit manufacturing process. We will cover the following topics:
- Recognizing inherent variability in continuous production
- Identifying sources of process output variation
- Describing variation in a structured manner
- Applying basic probability and statistics concepts to characterize process variation
- Differentiating between design specifications and process capability
- Synthesizing novel approaches to unfamiliar situations by extending the core material (i.e. go beyond the “standard” uses).
- Assessing the appropriateness of various statistical methods for a variety of problems
Develop the engineering and management skills needed for competence and competitiveness in today’s manufacturing industry with the Principles of Manufacturing MicroMasters Credential, designed and delivered by MIT’s #1-ranked Mechanical Engineering department in the world. Learners who pass the 8 courses in the program will earn the MicroMasters Credential and qualify to apply to gain credit towards MIT’s Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing & Design program.
What You’ll Learn:
- Variation modeling using the theory of Random Processes
- Statistical Process Control (SPC) foundations and applications
- Xbar, EWMA, CUSUM and discrete event methods for detecting process problems
- Methods for analyzing process changes by looking at general process physics
- How to apply these methods to achieve world-class quality in unit manufacturing processes

MicroMasters® Program in Principles of Manufacturing
Learn from the world’s #1 ranked Mechanical Engineering department
Prerequisites:
- Engineering Undergraduate preparation
- Some knowledge of basic manufacturing processes
- Knowledge or probability theory is helpful but not necessary
Meet Your Instructors:

David Hardt
