Client:
Team: Jay Mandyam
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2008
Documents: Final report (PDF)
In Hollywood, the Assistant Director is in charge of creating the shooting schedule and the Unit Production Manager has the task of making sure that each and every crew position is filled for every day of shooting. On smaller, independent, low-budget movies, however, scheduling is at the mercy of the actors and the crew since they usually work for free or for a small stipend. It thus falls on the producer to create the shooting schedule based on people’s availabilities. Typically, the “easiest” way to approach this is to do it manually, with a lot of guessing, testing, and revising. Read more…
Client: North Texas Food Bank
Team: Allison Griffin, Pragya Lohani, Megan Walker
Faculty advisor: Year: 2009
Documents: Report (Final report) Presentation (PPT)
The North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) is a non-profit hunger relief organization that distributes donated, purchased, and prepared foods through a network of feeding programs in 13 North Texas counties. From these counties nearly 700,000 individuals live below the federal poverty level. The North Texas Food Bank’s mission is to passionately pursue a hunger-free community; more specifically their “Close-the-Gap” initiative is to make 50 million meals available annually.1 This project seeks to solve one problem at the food bank that will hopefully help the organization achieve this goal more efficiently and quickly. Read more…
Client: US Treasury-Federal Reserve Bank
Team: Morgan Brunz, Brittany McCluskey
Faculty advisor: Dr. Siems, Barr
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has a call center that responds to customer requests to change from receiving checks in the mail to direct deposit. The center’s call volume varies throughout the month and day. They have hired 23 permanent employees, and on a daily basis, they hire a different amount of temporary employees. Our goal is to determine the number of temporary employees they should hire each day and those employees’ schedules. We seek to minimize cost and maximize customer service. Read more…
Client: Towers Perrin, TeePee Convenience Stores
Team: Eric Mentz, Greg Meurer
Faculty: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1995
Documents: Final report
Tee Pee is a United-States-based convenience store chain (renamed for confidentiality reasons) consisting of approximately 4000 stores. Tee Pee is in the process of developing a system for their individual store managers that would help them to adequately staff their stores based on customer flow and satisfaction.
The consultants at Towers Perrin formulated a manual model, which was developed into the Store Staffing Tool. We saw an opportunity to automate this model and develop an algorithm that would automatically assign employees to certain hours of the week, based on availability and competency. The resulting output of this algorithm not only shows the work schedule for the week; it also shows the staffing levels required, the total number of labor hours needed during the week, the overall labor cost of running that store for one week, and it highlights which employees are not being used adequately. Read more…
Client: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Team: Chris Genda, Loan Ngoyen, Valerie Vlahos, John Williams
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1997
Documents: Final presentation
The present operations procedures used by the NASA Manufacturing Division has room for improvement in the following areas: information accuracy within the INFISY system and tracking machine downtime, departmental communication, job scheduling at each work center, and estimating job cost and completion time. Due to the combined errors and problems mentioned within the Division, several effects are obvious.
The inaccurate use of the INFISY system has led to an incomplete historical data set, which has greatly affected the forecasting of completion times of jobs. This is apparent in the very large negative variances (actual-estimated time). The high percentages of those not logged out on INFISY have led to part mislocation. Job scheduling is difficult without tracking intermediate completion dates. Not monitoring machine down time leads to possible higher repair costs than sometimes purchasing a new machine. Under the current use and application of the INFISY software, job scheduling and forecasting are not optimized as needed. Addressing these issues gradually will improve the production operation. Read more…