MALVERN, Pa. — Penn State graduate student Pavlo Mrdjenovic loves making improvements wherever he can, he said, whether identifying ways to reduce the cost of aerosol can production at his workplace, or by continuing his education to improve his own life.
As a quality manager at Sonoco, a packaging company, Mrdjenovic oversees the manufacturing process for aerosol cans — on the order of one million per day — which are used in many household products, such as spray paint, disinfectant spray, whipped cream and much more. He ensures that the cans meet food-grade safety standards, prepares for annual quality audits, and addresses day-to-day quality concerns throughout the plant. He also examines data, observes trends and solves problems, such as investigating and mitigating manufacturing defects.
“Every year, I work on several projects to make incremental, slight improvements to the process,” he said. “It’s very easy to see the fruits of your labor.”
To improve his knowledge and career opportunities, Mrdjenovic enrolled in Penn State Great Valley’s Master of Engineering Management program to build on his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering.
“Nearly every single class directly applied to work,” he said. “One of the most beneficial ones that I use on a regular basis is the general application of statistics in the realm of quality and management.”
In his Quality and Continuous Improvement class, Mrdjenovic learned to use Minitab, statistical software for data analysis and process improvement. He put this new skill to work analyzing data regarding new material trials for the bottom component of a certain aerosol can size.
“I was assigned to lead and facilitate all aspects of the project, from technical analysis through financial justification and implementation planning,” Mrdjenovic said. “We conducted multiple trial runs to evaluate the performance of the new material, and Minitab allowed me to efficiently analyze variation, performance metrics and statistical significance.”
With many variables to track and large amounts of data to evaluate, Mrdjenovic said, “Minitab helped take the analysis to the next level. You could try to do that with Excel, but it’s not quite the right tool [for this analysis].”
To complete this new materials trial, Mrdjenovic mentioned that he incorporated concepts from his courses on operations management, finance and technical project management.
“Overall, this project was a strong example of how the engineering management curriculum translates directly into applied, cross-functional problem-solving," he said. "It required technical validation, statistical analysis, supply chain risk evaluation, financial modeling and structured project execution — all working together toward one business decision.”
Mrdjenovic took on a more complex number-crunching and process improvement effort for his capstone project. He said he proposed an idea to his plant manager: creating an optimized model for manufacturing aerosol can components. The cans have three parts — a cylindrical body, a top and a bottom — which can be more than 20 different sizes and various thicknesses, depending on how much pressure the cans need to withstand.
“It comes out to a lot of different combinations and possibilities,” said Mrdjenovic. “It’s definitely not computable with pencil and paper.”
He explained that the bodies of whipped cream cans, for example, don’t have to be as thick as cans made to hold brake cleaner. But the plant has to stop production and adjust the equipment to change the thickness, losing valuable production time during the changeover.
“If you decide to make the whipped cream cans as thick as the brake cleaner cans, you don’t have to stop your equipment, but you’ll have an additional material cost,” Mrdjenovic said. “This capstone project was about taking production data from the past four years and creating a model and optimizing that model to see what combination of aerosol can components would be the most efficient in terms of material cost and downtime.”
Mrdjenovic worked on this project with four of his engineering management classmates — Jenika Mehta, Ramkrishna Kadam, Bibhuti Bhusan Sahoo and Shantanu Satpute — with guidance from Ashkan Negahban, associate professor of engineering management, and Mohamad Darayi, associate professor of systems engineering.
“Optimizing our model was the first challenge we had,” Mrdjenovic said. The initial Excel file contained 50 columns and 500,000 rows of data — too much for Excel Solver to process.
“We had to get creative in how we set everything up,” Mrdjenovic said. The team translated the data to variables represented by ones and zeroes — a more efficient binary programming optimization model.
While his team was working on this project, Mrdjenovic said, steel tariffs went into effect, increasing material costs.
“That was another variable that we built into the spreadsheet to analyze,” he said.
The final optimization model indicated that standardizing the thickness of the cans to reduce downtime led to significant cost savings, with the trade-off of a marginal increase in material costs. Mrdjenovic said the model confirmed his and his plant supervisor’s hypotheses about efficient manufacturing, while giving them a useful tool to factor in changes to material costs and determine the most favorable outcomes.
Negahban helped Mrdjenovic and his classmates prepare a conference paper based on their capstone project and submit it to the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference and Expo last year.
“The expert referees that reviewed our paper appreciated the applicability and benefit of the proposed model and its contribution to the field,” Negahban said.
He helped Mrdjenovic obtain funding from Penn State Great Valley to travel to the IISE conference in Atlanta last June to present their paper, “Optimizing Component Selection in Aerosol Can Production: A Practical Model with Industrial Application,” which was published in the 2025 IISE conference proceedings.
Now that his capstone project is completed, Mrdjenovic said, he can still use the spreadsheet for making calculations at Sonoco, since the sheet contains lots of data in a format that he can easily manipulate and analyze.
“It does save time when it comes to large operational questions,” he said, such as whether switching to a new material would save money.
Seeing the value he got from his engineering management degree, Mrdjenovic said he decided to keep learning in Great Valley's MBA program, sharpening his business and operational skills and gaining a broader perspective across industries.
“I’m always willing to get better in almost every facet of life,” he said. “Whatever you learn in class, you can apply in the real world. It makes your job easier, too. You’re better at your job, and you’re doing it more effectively. You’re saving yourself time and optimizing your career.”