Lessons 1 and 2 gave students the job and the system. This lesson gives them the read: the judgment to walk into a facility and hear what it's telling them before a single question gets asked. The one outcome every student must leave with is that they stop reaching for equipment and start reading people, flow, and the physical state of the place. Don't lecture the discovery checklist off a slide. Put them in the Riverside meeting, make them catch what the room told them, then walk the floor and make them read it.
| Segment | Min | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Open in the meeting | 6 | Read the four introductions aloud, in character if you can. Don't comment yet. Let the room sit with Tom leading on money, Ray not knowing why he's there, Dana saying manually, and Michael warning that two systems already died. |
| The room reads you | 6 | Now unpack it. Ask what each person told you before you asked anything. Land the idea: while you read the operation, the operation reads you back. Every person in that room is deciding whether you heard them. |
| The facility walk | 10 | What to look at before you ask a question: manual processes and headcount per task, floor wear, where people cluster, where product sits idle. Put the Riverside plan on screen. Walk it dock to mezzanine. Surface the carton in the wrong lane and let them read it. |
| Reading existing automation | 10 | Maintained versus abandoned. The physical state tells you more than any interview. Run the five questions, then the closer: would you install it again. Work the 80 percent framing: an abandoned system is a customer who was let down, not a lost cause. |
| The powered-off conveyor | 6 | Run the Pro Tip and the 3W decision card. Drive the failure home: pitching new automation to someone next to a system they abandoned, without asking why it died. Preview the checkpoint scenario here. |
| Personality and the operator | 8 | Every warehouse has a personality that predicts whether they will maintain what you build. Then Think Like the Operator: who clears the 2 AM jam. Tie it back to Michael's one maintenance guy. |
| Key teaching moment | 8 | Stated ask versus observed need, below. This is the heart of the lesson and the heart of Module 1. Don't shortchange it. |
| Riverside readout and close | 6 | Build the facility readout with the class from the meeting and the walk. Collect each student's readout into their running Riverside note. Grade the read, not the neatness. |
| Total | 60 | Baseline session. Expand with the stretch options below if you have 90 minutes. |
This is the central tension of Module 1 and the reason this lesson exists. Ask the room directly: has anyone ever sat in a meeting where the customer asked for one thing but clearly needed something different? What did you do? How do you handle that professionally, without telling the customer they're wrong? Let the stories come. Most rooms have at least one good one, and a real story lands harder than anything on a slide.
Then anchor it in Riverside. Dana asked for a system that reads a barcode and routes a carton to the right door. That's the stated ask. The observed need is bigger: a sort with no verification, a maintenance team of one, two dead systems, and a building that fights you at the mezzanine. A student who designs only to Dana's sentence builds the wrong system correctly. Push them to see the gap between what she said and what the operation showed. That gap is where the engineering judgment lives, and it's the difference between an order-taker and a solutions professional.
The deliverable is a facility readout: a short, structured read of the operation written before any equipment is named. Build Riverside's version on the board from the meeting and the walk. Every line traces to something they saw or heard, not something they assumed.
The failure mode this lesson is built to prevent is the student who inventories equipment instead of reading people and flow. They come back from a walk with a parts list and no idea how the place works or where it hurts. Drive them back to the people and the movement. Signs:
Read the four introductions with weight. The scene is doing work: Tom sets the financial gate, Ray reveals the systems side is an afterthought, Michael plants the maintenance requirement, and Dana names the problem and, in one word, its nature. Manually. Ask the room to catch that word on their own. If nobody flinches at it, the read hasn't landed yet.
On the walk, the carton in the wrong lane is your best teaching object. Ask what that one carton says before anyone quotes a machine. Steer them to the truth: the three percent misdirect rate isn't a statistic, it's happening in front of them, and it's a verification problem, not a speed problem. That read reframes the whole project.
Note for you: students will notice the maintenance lead shares a name with the program's author. Handle it the way the student page does, with one dry line. Same name, no relation, good name. Then move on, and keep the focus on Michael's actual role: the maintenance requirement that constrains every later decision.
The facility readout the students start today isn't a one-off worksheet. It's the foundational page of the project folder they'll carry through the whole program, and it feeds every downstream module: the product profile in Part II, the rate work, the controls and interfaces, eventually the proposal. Keep reinforcing the running Riverside note habit from Lessons 1 and 2, and every time Riverside comes up, have them add to the same dated document.
Don't tell them where the habit leads. The payoff is theirs to find when the capstone asks them to design Riverside's full system and the students who kept a clean readout from day one discover they already did the hardest part. Your job now is to make the readout feel like simply what professional engineers do.