Client: Heeling Sports Limited Team: Gustavo Carrere and Marcus Klintmalm Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems Year: 2005 Documents: Final Report (PDF)
The Heeling Sports Limited is a Dallas-based footwear designer, manufacturer and distributor. The Company’s mission is to generate new and exciting footwear utilizing contemporary and progressive styles with comfort-enhancing performance features. To generate new footwear style HSL will introduce one product per year through acquisition or in-house development.
Extensive interviews and observation lead us to several bottlenecks in the order process. Most often these bottlenecks concerned procedure rather than anything else. There are many simple, no-cost options to optimizing the Heelys order process. Read more…
Award Winner: Omega Rho National
Student Project Competition
Client: Quest Resource, Inc.
Team: John Jarvis, Claudia Johnson, Liana Vetter
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
Currently, Quest guarantees about 85% of its gas through monthly contracts, while selling the remaining at the daily price. The amount to guarantee per sale point per month is a major decision within Quest. The motivation for Quest to optimize this process is two-fold. First, by paying close attention to past production, optimization can help assure that Quest will rarely produce under their monthly guarantee and will never incur a penalty for that underproduction. Second, through researching the historical relationship between Quest’s contract prices and the corresponding market prices for each month, Quest can better estimate the contract volume that will maximize revenue. Read more…
Client: American Airlines Center
Team: Andrew Conway, Marcos Garza, Tabatha G. Olaechea, Jennifer Keen, Marcus Wentrck
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
The American Airlines Center is a dual – purpose facility; they house the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks as well as the NHL’s Dallas Stars and must accommodate them both through out their respective seasons. The AAC is setup to change back and forth to both set ups. Making a quicker transition time when switching from a basketball court to a hockey rink would decrease scheduling conflicts between the two teams, and possibly allow for an increase in other sports; and non-sporting (i.e. concerts, seminars, rodeos, etc.) events to take place in the arena. This could potentially increase revenue for the AAC. As of right now they do not make much money on the Maverick’s and Star’s games, so by decreasing changeover time, they would be able to bring in other venues to increase the amount of money they make in a fiscal year.
Client: Alcon Inc.
Team: C. Davis, C. Ngo, D. Nguyen, S. Ramdhanny, B. Long
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (PDF), final presentation (PPT)
Alcon, Inc. has successfully progressed into a research-and-development-driven, global pharmaceutical company focused on eye care. At their headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, Alcon operates two manufacturing plants that produce more than 10,000 unique products. In October 2003, Alcon closed their Madrid (Spain) manufacturing plant and assigned its manufacturing responsibilities to Fort Worth. The combined product lines have currently been in production with unacceptable inefficiencies, including loss in whitestock production and production time, packaging and labeling difficulties as well as capacity and scheduling issues.
The Southern Methodist University undergraduate engineering students (Team Alcon) volunteered to review current manufacturing operations and propose process improvements with the goal of achieving significant cost savings. The sole purpose of this project will be to observe, develop, evaluate, and implement management science concepts that will significantly support and impact efficiency levels. Read more…
Client: Gonzalez Orange Groove
Team: Rafael Alvarez, Sylia Gallegos, Juan Carlos Gonzalez, Sky Noyd
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2008
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
For this project we represent both the client and the consultant. This is possible because Juan is the owner of an orange grove in Veracruz, Mexico and he is interested in maximizing his profit by analyzing the revenues and costs of production for his orange grove. Read more…
The purpose of this study is to analyze historical data on the Dallas Police Department’s First Offender Programs in order to determine the effectiveness of the programs, and to develop a model to predict the probability of the program being successful for an offender. Using graphing techniques, statistical techniques and operations research techniques the sample was analyzed to reach conclusions about the efficiency of the two programs. Read more…
Client: Heeling Sports Limited
Client: Dallas Police Department