Industrial and systems engineering students coordinated with Delaware Valley Steel for a mock redesign of their facilities, putting the concepts they’ve learned in the classroom to the test in a real-world project.
Photo courtesy of Jesse O'Neill, Ben Feldman & Delaware Valley Steel
Senior Design serves as a capstone for a Temple engineering student’s journey. This final project allows students to put the concepts, theories and skills learned in class to the test as they collaborate with their peers to develop a design for a project with the potential for real-world applications.
Equally important to the Senior Design project itself is the preparation and preparedness required of students in the lead up.
Students in Industrial and Systems Engineering Senior Design Project Ⅰ during the fall 2025 semester had the opportunity to collaborate with the company Delaware Valley Steel on a real-world project.
Delaware Valley Steel is a steel plate supplier and processor. The company had recently made a significant investment in a new machine and wanted to revamp the manufacturing facility’s layout to further improve their efficiency. While Delaware Valley Steel already had a solution in mind, their then CEO now Executive Advisor Jerry Sharpe, Tom Edwards, professor of instruction and chair of the Engineering, Technology & Management Department, and Mohammad Ali Al-Adaileh, assistant professor of instruction, connected to get College of Engineering students involved in the redesign.
“Tom and I got introduced a couple of years ago as Temple being a possible place for us to look for interns from. When he presented me with this project, it was a no-brainer, as we had just invested in an expensive machine and were looking for ideas to improve our plant layout,” said Sharpe.
The project was a perfect fit for students in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Senior Design Project Ⅰ course to practice working and communicating with an external partner while designing solutions within real-world constraints by implementing the concepts and skills they learned in a variety of courses included in the ISE curriculum such as Facility Planning, Manufacturing Systems Design and others.
The six students in the course were split into two groups, working parallel on their separate solutions. The ultimate goal was to propose alternative layouts for the shop floor by determining the locations of the machines, including the new one, to optimize the efficiency of the material flow, and minimize lead time, material handling costs and time and back tracking of the material.
The students found value in seeing the manufacturing facility in person, as it changed their original thinking around the design. “When you’re learning material in lecture, there is only so much that can translate over; when you are involved in a project like this, there are many more moving components that need to be factored in,” said Ben Feldman, ENG ’26. “Because of this, it is much more important to see the bigger picture to tie everything together.”
For Justin Kerney, ENG ’26, collaborating with the group enhanced his ability to balance the expectations and requirements of both internal and external stakeholders.
“My big takeaways were learning expectation management in a professional environment, learning how to design user-forward ideas and understanding how to communicate technical ideas to a non-technical audience,” said Kerney. “The DVS project provided me a strong foundation in approaching engineering projects and helped me to achieve fourth place for my new project in Senior Design!”
At the end of the semester, both groups presented Delaware Valley Steel with an optimal solution that required major structural changes to the facility and a secondary solution without structural changes. The optimal solution was expected to reduce the material handling distance by approximately 30%, which also reduces the orders' lead time. The students’ secondary solution wasn’t too far off from the actual plan Delaware Valley Steel selected and was estimated to reduce material handling distance by approximately 15%.
Sharpe was impressed with the students’ solutions. “I was genuinely excited with the level of enthusiasm shown by this group of students,” he said. “They were not just going through the motions but were genuinely seeking out real-life answers to real-life issues.”
Al-Adaileh saw firsthand how valuable the experience was for his students. Close and in-person collaboration was key to his students’ learning ability and understanding of concepts they learned in-class and the type of challenges that might face implementing them in the real-world.
“They got to see that sometimes what you suggest on paper looks great,” said Al-Adaileh. “But when you go to the field you make some assumptions that certain things will work perfectly, but you realize that you need to make some changes.”
He hopes to continue incorporating real-world projects into the curriculum to help prepare students for a successful career in engineering and to have a place-based impact in Philadelphia.