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Don T. Phillips

GDon  T.  Phillips has a PhD in Industrial  And Systems Engineering from The University of Arkansas and retired from Texas A&M University in 2018.  He is currently a Member of the Industrial Engineering Department at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas

 

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Don Phillips has been around Texas A&M University long enough to see a fair share of changes take place.

In his 40 years as a manufacturing and industrial engineering professor in the Dwight Look College of Engineering, he has seen women accepted into the Corps of Cadets for the first time, six Reveille mascots and campus enrollment grow by more than 30,000 students. But there was always one constant: textbook prices never seemed to stop increasing. Phillips bucked the trend in May when he and Auburn University professor J.T. Black teamed up to self-publish a 390-page textbook that won the Shingo Institute's Research and Professional Publication award in May for its unique content.

He hopes the book, titled "Lean Engineering: The Future Has Arrived," which sells for as low as $48 used and $65 new through the official university bookstore, will encourage educators to produce award-winning materials while simultaneously keeping costs for students low.

"I didn't think it was fair to the students to pay $100 to $150 for a book," Phillips said.

According to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the price of college textbooks rose 82 percent between 2002 and 2013, nearly six times the rate of inflation. The official A&M bookstore website shows the price of some engineering textbooks are as low as $27 used and as high as $325 new, but many fall in the $100-$200 range.

Phillips said he has not assigned students to purchase textbooks in his 40 years, but has instead chosen to pull "the best of the best" information from other materials, which he cites and compiles into packets for students. He and Black took the same approach to developing rough copies of "Lean Engineering" five years ago, which students have used in classes at their respective schools. Most of the material in the book is from research and reports from automobile companies such as Toyota Motor Co., which first introduced "lean methodologies" in Japan.

To keep costs low, Phillips and Black went through College Station-based Virtual Bookworm Publishing. Phillips said he and Black wrote the book and created the graphics, while the company designed the front and back cover. When Phillips needs books for his class, he simply orders them and sells them for $50 in class. Students can also use an "ebook" version or order on Amazon.com.

Phillips said lean engineering is the "relentless pursuit of eliminating waste, reducing variance, producing a defect-free product and saving money using lean methodologies." The book hopes to redefine the classical industrial engineer and define a new manufacturing engineering discipline by applying "lean" approaches to engineering. It also has applications outside of industrial engineering in professions that include banking and health care.

Former engineering college dean Kemble Bennett said Phillips' lean manufacturing course was a hit. It could have grown to 60 to 70 students, but Phillips chose to keep it around 30.

"This particular book, where he takes the area of lean practices in the industry and creates an engineering approach, is really pioneering," Bennett said. "I'm not surprised that he won the award."

The book has caught on quickly at several major universities, including Auburn, Lamar, Houston and Washington State, and is expected to pick up as the school year draws closer. Phillips has big expectations for the students who apply the book's materials to their careers.

"They will be able to walk into any manufacturing or service system and recognize the waste that is taking place in that process and eliminate that waste," Phillips said.

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