Client: Frito Lay
Team: Javier Gonzalez, Fernando Sada, Marcelo Sada
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
In order to satisfy the large Hispanic market in the United States, Frito Lay imports products manufactured in Mexico by Gamesa, a sister company to Frito Lay due to the fact that they are both owned by PepsiCo. Gamesa has plants all across Mexico, having the main ones located in Celaya, Vallejo, Obregon and Monterrey. In the past, all products being imported into the U.S were produced in Obregon, a city in Northwestern Mexico. As of today, the Hispanic population has dispersed all across the country, increasing Gamesa’s market to a large portion of it. Gamesa’s products are now being distributed all the way from California, to Texas, and onto the East Coast and Midwest. Imports have increased so much that in order to satisfy the demand, Gamesa has started producing all across Mexico for exports. Read more…
Client: Pratt & Whitney Engine Services
Team: Michael DeVore
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (Word)
The Pratt and Whitney Addison Service Center is a unique situation involving rental engines and their repair. These engines are delivered by a 3rd party carrier and must be checked over and repaired if necessary. At that point the engine must be sent back out to either the customer who rented it or to another intermediate step. The Addison, TX Service Center Manager requested help in optimizing the employee’s time spent on these rental engines. He wanted to know what could be done to improve Service Center response time and maximize output. Read more…
Client: Carrollton Concentra
Team: Daniel Olivares, Beverly Ross, Devin Kyles
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Concentra presented the problem of cross-staffing some of its employees throughout its centers. The problem addresses a potential decision of staffing methods of which the options were to staff to the market or create a cross-staffing model. These decisions relied upon the variability of patient visits among the centers and the ability to schedule based on future forecasted patient visits. Ultimately, the question was to find if there is an opportunity to staff across all centers or must it be dynamically adjusted based on forecasting by center. A solution to this problem would potentially decrease patient wait times and turnaround times (a patient’s check-in time to checkout time), idle times in which staff members are not performing any duties, and times in which centers experience a heavier traffic flow. Read more…
Client: Austin Commercial
Team: David Walls
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (PDF)
Austin Commercial is a prominent Texas-based construction firm specializing in large-scale projects, including the American Airlines Center, D/FW Airport, and other Dallas landmarks. In recent years, a major challenge has emerged: how to manage the large number of change orders in their construction projects. The focus of this work is to quantify these changes and calculate their impacts on the construction’s cost and schedule. Read more…
Client: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Team: Alex Grosjean, Brianna Bauer
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Every month, the Treasury sends out roughly ten million physical checks for Social Security payments and other benefits. On average, it costs them about $1 apiece to send these checks via surface mail. As a cost saving method, the Treasury is now requiring these recipients to use direct-deposit methods, and will eventually cease to send out physical checks.
This is where the Federal Reserve’s GoDirect program comes in. GoDirect is both a call center and a website which helps the recipients switch over to direct deposits, which only cost about 9 cents per person. The return on investment for this project is expected to be ten years. The Call Center wishes to optimize the schedule of employees to handle these incoming calls; thus our goal is to design a model to minimize the cost associated with the call center. Read more…
Client: Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control
Team: Stephen Beckert, Brandon Joslin, Pierce, Meier
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2010
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Lockheed Martin presented us with a project more exciting than we could ever imagine: aiding the research into ways to model the effects of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). EMP is extremely devastating and can be caused by both natural and man-made events. EMP primarily affects electronic devices, rendering them useless or destroyed. Since the United States is heavily dependent on electronic interfaces, we are extremely vulnerable to this effect. In addition to this vulnerability to the EMP effect, the United States has a complex system of connected critical infrastructures that have not been studied as interrelated systems. This presents a major problem, how can one forecast the possible failures of such a massive complex system? Read more…
Categories: Computational probability, Dallas-Ft. Worth Area, Defense, Energy, Final report, Forecasting, Government, Integer programming, Nonlinear programming, Operations, Planning, Presentation, Reliability analysis, Scheduling, Simulation, United States, Video Tags:
Client: Methodist Dallas Medical Center
Team: Kyle Chester, Kristin Evanto, and Emily Gray
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2010
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
A “hub” of activity at MDMC is the Outpatient Services department. Outpatient Services exists to serve the needs of physicians and surgeons alike with routine x-rays, blood draws to test for Tuberculosis or other ailments, or diagnostics to assess patient health. Many patients who come to Outpatient Services are preparing for surgery and thus need to undergo preliminary screens such as blood draws and EKGs.
The focus of this project is the observation and analysis of the administrative and technical operations within the laboratory component of Outpatient Services. Outpatient Services aims to reduce its patient wait times throughout the entire duration of a patient’s stay in Outpatient Services. Management has expressed a desire to reduce patient wait times such that 95% of all patients wait less than 15 minutes for the Outpatient laboratory department. Read more…
Client: Capstone Asset Management Co.
Team: Mallory Harrison, Natalie Jaroski
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2010
Documents: Final report (PDF), Presentation (PDF)
Capstone is a privately owned investment advisory firm in Houston, TX that offers privately managed accounts to achieve client’s financial objectives. They currently manage over $3.8 billion in assets for about 3,000 different clients. They provide products and services through three distribution channels: brokers/advisors, institutions/corporations, and high-net-worth individuals. Revenues are generated by marginal product fees associated with assets under management allocated by product.
Capstone has in place a detailed budgeting process but desires to expand the process to include financial modeling to measure profitability by product. Our goal for this project is to develop a model that would calculate existing profitability on assets under management by product. Our second goal is to develop an optimization model that takes into account the revenues and expenses associated with sales of existing products versus the revenues and expenses associated with the development of new products. The final output of the optimization model is to identify the most profitable mix for new product sales. Read more…
Categories: Final report, Finance, Forecasting, Houston, Marketing, Optimization, Planning, Presentation, Scheduling, Simulation, Texas, United States, Video Tags:
Client: Lake Highlands Soccer Association
Team: Sherif Khalifa
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2008
Documents: Final Report (Word), Presentation (PPT)
The scheduling of sports competitions is a challenge for both professional teams, such as the NBA, to amateur leagues. In this project an effective strategy to model sports scheduling is developed.
Lake Highlands Soccer Association was formed in 1972 to promote the sport of Soccer in Dallas’ Lake Highlands area and throughout North Texas and serves as the “Home Association” for about 1,800 youth players from neighborhoods in the Dallas and Richardson school districts. The LHSA’s Boys League Director provided data that is needed in developing their schedules and a constraint-programming model was implemented that meets all their requirements and delivers a far more effective solution.
Similar to many leagues, Lake Highland Soccer Association uses an inefficient method of scheduling to determine all leagues games. There is no model in place, and schedules are done manually, leading to many wasted hours to determine a schedule that may be suitable to the each league’s constraints. Read more…
Client: Sabre Holdings: Sabre Airline Solutions
Team: Lauren Duplantis, Hamel Husain, Francisco Villagran
Faculty advisor: Dr. Siems Year: 2003
Documents: Final report (PDF)
Our project involved working with Sabre Inc. on a problem that they were having with their system StaffPlan that is maintained by their Airline Solutions Division. StaffPlan is an Airline Solutions system that minimizes the number of check-in agents at an airport based on the time of day, queue, airline, destinations, and passenger arrival curve categories. Read more…
