Automation in Production Systems and Management

Professor Pradip Kumar Ray, presently Emeritus Professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) and Adviser, Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSoM), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, received his PhD and MTech (IE&OR) degrees from IIT Kharagpur, and Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering degree from IIEST Shibpur, India. Professor Ray with more than forty four years of diversified experience – eight years at General Electric Company of India and more than thirty six years of teaching and research experience at IIT Kharagpur has also served as Visiting Professor and Investigator at a number of universities abroad, like Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus; USF, Tampa, USA; CQU, Gladstone, Australia; PNGUNRE, PNG; USP, Fiji, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, etc and trained in Japan on Production Management/JIT-based Manufacturing. He has published one text book titled ‘Product and Process Design for Quality Economy and Reliability’, three edited books by Springer, 24 book chapters, 6 lecture packages, and 170 papers in international and national journals of repute and conferences in the areas of healthcare management, environmental management, productivity measurement and evaluation, quality design and control, TQM, process optimization, ergonomics/human factors engineering, safety engineering and management and other related topics. His areas of interest and research include productivity modeling, quality engineering, ergonomics/human factors engineering, safety engineering, engineering asset management and JIT-based/lean engineering operations management. With substantial number of industry and research grants to his credit, Prof Ray has supervised 22 PhD scholars, and more than 155 MTech and 96 B-Tech projects, coordinated several outreach training programmes and courses for industries and academic institutions on several topics of his interest (till date 70), including Ministry of Education, Government of India-sponsored GIAN courses on Engineering Asset Management, Ergonomics/HFE, Production and Operations Management, Quality Engineering in Products and Processes, Environmental Performance of Manufacturing Systems: Modelling and Application; and Sustainable Production Management: Concepts and Practices; and other courses on SPC, TQM, Six Sigma, JIT/Lean Engineering, Materials Management, Environment Management, Workplace Stress Management and Ergonomics and long-duration training programme on Industrial Safety Engineering, and Safety Competence Building (SCB) in Material Handling for Tata Steel. He organized the international conference, MESH-2016, in December, 2016 at IIT Kharagpur, and attended several International Conferences and Congresses as a keynote speaker and a session chair. Under NPTEL on-line certification course, currently he offers four 12-week 30-hour duration courses on ‘Quality Design and Control’, ‘Management of Inventory Systems’, ‘Automation in Production Systems and Management’ and ‘Human Factors Engineering’ for UG, PG and PhD students and industry professionals.

A former Head of ISE department and Dean of VGSoM of IIT Kharagpur, Professor Ray is a certified Lead Assessor for ISO-9001 registration, and actively involved in a number of industrial consulting and research projects (31 such projects till date) in his interest areas. He is a member of several professional bodies, such as Indian Society of Ergonomics, INFORMS and IIMM, a Fellow of World Academy of Productivity Sciences (WAPS) and a Fellow of Institution of Engineers (India). He is a recipient of prestigious P C Mahalanobis Award of Operational Research Society of India (ORSI) for his outstanding contribution in the field of Engineering in the year 2018, APO National Award for Productivity Technical Expert in the year 2022 by Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo, Japan, IEA/Tsinghua Award by International Ergonomics Association for contribution in Post-graduate Educational Program and International Collaborative Research in Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics in the year 2023, and SRESA Life-Time Achievement Award for the year 2024 by Society for Reliability and Safety (SRESA) for contribution in HFE application for reliable and safe production systems.