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Finalist: Kris Adendorff Award - Most Prominent Industrial Engineering Professional

John Bicheno is a Professor of Lean Enterprise at the University of Buckingham, UK. An Associate Professor and Head of IE from 1984 to 1987 at the University of Witwatersrand. He began Systems Engineering. Grew postgrad IE from 40 to 80 students per year. Lectured on postgrad ‘Lean Manufacturing’, 2000 to present; now taken by over 600. He admitted the first black undergrad and postgrad I.E. students in South Africa. At Lean Enterprise Research Centre, 1996-2013, Cardiff Business School. Started the first MSc in Lean in the world in 1999. The 200+ graduates are now directors and consultants in many countries.

Co-founder of ‘European Lean Educator Conference’, now in its 5th year.

Books: ‘Lean Toolbox’, (cumulative sales of over 110,000 copies).  28 others, including editions and translations. Keynote speaker at conferences in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Australia, UK, USA.  62 Publications. Google scholar citations 2370. Worked as mentor with dozens of companies.

Roland Röhrs is registered as a Professional Engineer and has a B Eng IE (Cum Laude) and MBA from University of Pretoria. In his earlier years he was a known entrepreneur and started/co-started and ran a handful of own businesses in consulting and manufacturing, most are still operational. Highlights during these years were when he was a founder partner of the first industrial engineering consulting firm in South Africa, Röhrs & Buys inc., later known as Xcel and in 1984 he became a major shareholder in a glass manufacturing concern, Glamosa Glass, in Estcourt  (KwaZulu-Natal) and was managing director from 1985 to 1995.

In 1997 Roland joined Organisational Development International (ODI), a productivity consulting company, as director doing 20 Keys (Kaizen) projects and was managing director as well. He has been non-executive chairman of ODI from 1st January 2003 to date. As part of turn-around projects Roland was asked in October 1997 to become Managing Director of Wispeco Holdings Limited and is serving as chairman of the Board of Directors from 2013. Roland has been part time lecturer at Industrial Engineering at University of Pretoria from 2014. He served or is still serving on various bodies – ECSA’s PAC IE, Tuks IE Advisory Board, Town Council, Student RC and many more. 

Finalist: SAIIE Award - Most Outstanding Industrial Engineering

Educator

Teresa Hattingh is passionate about industrial engineering.  She believes that every industrial engineer has the power to change the world and the responsibility to really make a difference.  She spends most of her energy on her undergraduate and postgraudate students exploring exciting ways to introduce industrial engineering to every aspect of society.  She is actively involved in engineering education research and is the African representative on the Research in Engineering Education (REEN) board.  She is currently working as an academic at the University of  Witwatersrand.

Prof David Kruger, holds a Doctorate in Engineering management. He has been in higher education for 21 years and during that time held various positions at a number of higher education institutions. During this time, he gained experience in teaching and learning as well as research. The experience includes lecturing at residential institutions as well at an Open Distance Learning institution.

During his tenure at the ODL institution he became aware of challenges facing students who do not attend classes and must self-reliant to master study material. As a result, he investigated numerous techniques to assist the students to attain a better understanding of their study material and thus increase the past rate. He utilised the electronic platform of the institution to disseminate extra worked examples of mathematical problems, produced videos to explain difficult concepts and presented online discussion classes. Detailed written feedback was produced for submitted assignment in which common mistakes made by students is discussed. The aforementioned resulted in a steady increase in the pass rate for the module Operations Research III.

Finalist: SAIIE Award - Most Outstanding Industrial Engineering

Young Researcher

Thereafter, he became a CIRP research affiliate and senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg. He was then also the director of the Manufacturing Research Centre and developed into a NRF rated researcher.

In 2014 he was appointed as director of the Rapid Product Development Laboratory at Stellenbosch University. He is currently an associate prof at the department of Industrial Engineering and the director of the Stellenbosch Technology Centre at Stellenbosch University.

Dr. Nadia Viljoen is a professionally registered engineer and returned to the University of Pretoria as senior lecturer in 2017. Her career has centred around freight transport modelling and supply chain economics research both at the CSIR and at GAIN (Pty) Ltd. Nadia studied her bachelor's and honours degrees at the University of Pretoria before embarking on a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

At the University of Pretoria Nadia is continuing her research in freight transport modelling and is currently piloting the Vertically Integrated Projects Programme in conjunction with the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Finalist: SAIIE Award - Most Outstanding Industrial Engineering

Researcher

Prof Johan W. Joubert is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and is also affiliated with the Centre for Transport Development in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology (EBIT). His research focuses on the development of decision-support models under uncertainty, especially related to access inequality and transport infrastructure spending. A particular interest is multi-modal, multi-agent simulation models in the (freight) transport domain. His research appeared in many leading international transport journals, including Transportation, the Journal of Transport Geography, Transportation Research, Cities, and Networks & Spatial Economics. He is a former Fellow of the Mobility Cultures in Mega-cities programme sponsored by the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), a research facility of the BMW Group. He is a director for the international Institute for City Logistics and have been visiting professor at both ETH Zürich in Switzerland and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria. He is a registered professional engineer with the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA); and in 2007 he received the President’s Award from the Southern African Institute for Industrial and Systems Engineering (SAIIE). He holds a C2-rating from the National Research Foundation (NRF).

Prof Khumbulani Mpofu completed his doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2011, after completing a masters in manufacturing systems and operations management in 2006 and a bachelor of engineering in industrial and manufacturing engineering in 2004. He is a specialist in reconfigurable manufacturing technologies, he has patented five products which are at various stages of commercialisation and authored and co-authored more than 100 journal, conference papers and book chapters. He has chaired and hosted several scientific events in the past. He has graduated four doctoral students and over 20 masters students in his unwavering pursuit to develop advanced manufacturing human capability in the South African economy. He is currently the Gibela Research Chair in Manufacturing and Skills Development where he is part of the academic infrastructure that has been setup to assist Gibela in its vision of the revitalisation of the commuter rail car manufacturing industry. He is also the founder of the Rail Manufacturing Centre for Entrepreneurship Rapid Incubator. The Incubator is aligned to the mandate of supporting the activities of modernising and renewing an ageing railcar fleet to ensure safe, affordable, reliable and affordable commuter transportation thus directly and indirectly contributing to economic growth in the country. It will be the driver in developing new technology based enterprises and cooperatives, unravelling the triple helix challenge of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The Rail Incubator will be a vehicle to translate the technological innovations developed at TUT into new technology based businesses.