Kathryn Elizabeth Stecke is an American industrial engineer and management scientist known for her expertise in flexible manufacturing, supply chains, and seru, a Japanese production system based on using small groups of workers to assemble whole products instead of using assembly lines in which each worker handles only a small and repetitive sub-assembly task. She is a professor of operations management in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she holds the Naveen Jindal School Advisory Council Chair.