Lehigh’s graduate program in Manufacturing Systems Engineering, a 1985 recipient of the LEAD Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, integrates systems perspectives with interdisciplinary education and training. The program is designed for experienced industry professionals to develop their appreciation and broad-based understanding of manufacturing systems design, integration and operation combining the management perspective with the engineers’ feel for events on the factory floor. The MSE program is available for full, part-time and distance students both synchronously and asynchronously. Classes incorporate team assignments which provide opportunities for engineers from diverse industrial backgrounds to work together sharing skills and concepts to produce solutions to real manufacturing problems.

The program emphasizes the systems point of view embracing business planning and management, product design, quality, logistics, manufacturing processes and technologies. The manufacturing system is viewed holistically from concept, or identification of need, through organization and transformation of resources in order to solve problems and provide customer satisfaction (even ‘delight’) out to eventual product retirement, recycling or remanufacture without incurring trauma or waste. Systems can be viewed generically as organizations that consume resources, including energy and people, to provide products (and services) thereby generating wealth in a sustainable manner.

MSE classes are offered on campus and broadcast through Lehigh's distance education program to students across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Students wishing to enroll in the MSE program must have industrial experience. Thirty credits are required for the M.S. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering. A forty-five credit MBA&E with an MSE concentration is available. In addition, the Center for Manufacturing Systems Engineering offers a certificate for the successful completion of 12 MSE credits in our award-winning manufacturing systems engineering graduate program. Over 360 MS in MSE degrees have been awarded since 1984.