ME or MEng Master of Engineering Master of Engineering Management 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company's supply chain is frequently disrupted by single-source suppliers. The most effective long-term risk mitigation strategy is to:
- Hold 12 months of safety stock for all components
- Qualify multiple alternative suppliers for critical parts (Correct answer)
- Negotiate penalty clauses with the current supplier
- Insource all manufacturing immediately
Correct answer: Qualify multiple alternative suppliers for critical parts
Supplier diversification eliminates single-point-of-failure risk and creates competitive pressure without the capital intensity of full insourcing.
Question 2: In Lean engineering management, 'Muda' refers to:
- The ideal future state of a value stream
- Any activity that consumes resources without adding customer value (Correct answer)
- A Japanese term for continuous improvement culture
- The standard work sequence for an operator
Correct answer: Any activity that consumes resources without adding customer value
Muda means waste — the seven wastes (overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion, defects) consume resources without creating value.
Question 3: When calculating a project's Schedule Performance Index (SPI), an SPI of 0.85 indicates:
- The project is 15% under budget
- The project is progressing at 85% of the planned rate (Correct answer)
- The project will finish 15 days early
- The project has 85% of tasks completed
Correct answer: The project is progressing at 85% of the planned rate
SPI = Earned Value / Planned Value; SPI < 1.0 means the project is behind schedule, earning only 85 cents of planned value per dollar of planned work.
Question 4: A Design of Experiments (DOE) approach helps engineering managers by:
- Eliminating the need for prototype testing
- Systematically identifying factor interactions affecting product performance (Correct answer)
- Certifying that a design meets regulatory standards
- Automating the tolerance stack-up analysis
Correct answer: Systematically identifying factor interactions affecting product performance
DOE allows efficient exploration of multiple input factors simultaneously, revealing main effects and interactions that one-factor-at-a-time testing misses.
Question 5: The 'make-or-buy' decision in engineering management should primarily be driven by:
- The preference of the lead engineer on the project
- Total cost, strategic capability, and supply risk analysis (Correct answer)
- Whether the company has previously made the component
- Minimizing headcount regardless of cost
Correct answer: Total cost, strategic capability, and supply risk analysis
Make-or-buy analysis weighs total lifecycle cost, whether the capability is a strategic core competency, and supplier reliability and risk.
Question 6: In engineering ethics, the NSPE Code of Ethics holds that engineers must hold paramount:
- Client confidentiality above all other obligations
- The safety, health, and welfare of the public (Correct answer)
- Their employer's competitive advantage
- Intellectual property protection
Correct answer: The safety, health, and welfare of the public
NSPE's first fundamental canon requires engineers to hold the safety, health, and welfare of the public as the highest professional obligation.
Question 7: A Monte Carlo simulation in project risk management is used to:
- Rank risks by severity on a probability-impact matrix
- Generate a probability distribution of possible project outcomes (Correct answer)
- Assign risk owners to each identified threat
- Calculate the expected monetary value of risk events
Correct answer: Generate a probability distribution of possible project outcomes
Monte Carlo simulation runs thousands of iterations with variable inputs to produce a probability distribution of outcomes like completion date or final cost.
ME or MEng Master of Engineering Master of Engineering Management 3
A company's supply chain is frequently disrupted by single-source suppliers.
The most effective long-term risk mitigation strategy is to: