Work perfect: the day we strive for.

Santee Cooper is a nonprofit electric and water utility serving more than 2 million South Carolinians. Our mission is to be the state's leading resource for improving the quality of life for the people of the state. We are focused on generating and providing low-cost, reliable energy, providing excellent customer service, protecting our environment, and being a leader in economic development.

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I'm the director of quality and performance support. We work on a request basis to help employees define and carry out their improvement initiatives. Our job is to understand a client's request, analyze the situation, and apply the most appropriate methods and tools. In doing so, we call upon a variety of IE skills and experience, including benchmarking, business planning, performance measurement, process mapping, project management, risk modeling, simulation, statistical methods, and survey design and analysis.

A great day is simply finding out that you have made a difference. It might be that you helped create something responsible for a substantial leap in corporate performance, but much more often it is that you were involved in making incremental improvements that positively impact performance and, hopefully, employees' work lives.

A perfect day would be finding out that the mindset of all employees had shifted from a functional to a process view. Beginning on that perfect day, we would understand, manage, and improve all processes in a holistic manner, and the process perspective would govern all decisions and actions. I believe such thinking is at the core of industrial engineering.

I first learned of IIE in 1987 from the faculty adviser to our University of Missouri student chapter. I remember him saying, "If you're going to be an industrial engineer, IIE will be your best resource." I've stayed active within IIE by presenting at annual conferences and serving on the board of the Society for Engineering and Management Systems.

--Interview by David Brandt

Dean B. Creed

Director

Quality and Performance Support

Santee Cooper

Moncks Corner, S.C.