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Automotive

Advanced Design and Manufacturing Institute (ADMI)

ADMI offers participants an exceptional opportunity to receive world-class training from outstanding professors at each of the partner universities. John Southwood an equipment engineer in the paint department at Honda jumped at the chance to enhance his skills by getting his masters in design and manufacturing while continuing to work.

Transcription:

Advanced Design and Manufacturing Institute (ADMI) 
John Southwood
Engineering Group, Honda Canada Inc

ADMI is the Advance Design And Manufacturing Institute; it is a consortium of the top five engineering schools in Ontario, Western, Waterloo, Queens, University of Toronto and McMaster. It is a Masters in engineering that makes available the top courses from all the schools delivered by their top professors. It makes the courses available to students across the Province in a module based platform, whereas each course is made up of two modules that are four days long and about 6 weeks apart. It provides a student with an M.Eng that can be engineering focused but can also have flavors of business application of those engineering principles.

The program itself is made up of 10 courses. You can select from a variety of courses for those ten. Because there is flexibility on the number of courses available I can select the courses that best apply to my current working needs. So I can choose a course that will provide me with the skills and tools I can turn around the next week and use here at Honda to do my day to day jobs. I’m doing the module base with four days in each module spread apart. It allowed me the flexibility to schedule my class time, my study time and my research time around the rest of my work and family life.

What you’ll find is that the ADMI people or graduates, once they’re done the program they don’t stop there. Because they’ve had exposure to so many other facets of the industry they’ll continue to go on and develop even more. So if you can hire someone from ADMI, in the end, maybe not at the day of their graduation, but in the end they’re going to develop paths past the MEng and look forward to new challenges. For myself since I left, since I graduated the ADMI program I moved on the study for my PMP. I took a project management course through ADMI, found it very interesting and also that the tools, strategies and techniques that I was seeing within that course I could say, wow I can really apply these to my business and make project management run a lot more effectively at my company. So it kind of pointed me in a direction of continued development.

There was a recurring theme through many of the ADMI courses and as you can see the theme coming from each of the five schools across the Province. You piece it together, the importance 
of customer focus in quality. So I think in Ontario with the maturity of our industry, we’re not just a matter of an in out process of doing what needs to be done. We’re always looking ahead trying to evolve and always implement continuous improvement. So the focus brought by these courses, be it through CAD, through quality management, through project management is always the emphasis on why are you doing this service or creating the product you’re creating. It’s for the customer. What does the customer want and how can you satisfy those customer needs. So it’s a very important aspect that ADMI continually…you continually see it throughout the courses to really make sure that that’s the mind set going into it. It’s everybody as a team for the benefit of the customer.

John Southwood
Engineering Group
Honda Canada Inc.

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