Client: Achieve Healthcare Technologies
Team: Kristin March, Laura Bailey, Rachel Potter, Allison Bass
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2006
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
Achieve Healthcare Technologies is the largest privately held provider of information system products and services to the long-term care industry. They serve clients across the U.S. and have long stood for higher quality and improved bottom lines for sub-acute long-term care, skilled nursing, assisted living, and continuing care retirement facilities and communities. Additionally, they have consistently led the industry in introducing new, innovative products and services. Read more…
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…
Client:
Team: Ava Damri, Calvin Smellage, Al Zinkand
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 2009
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
Our team examines the evacuation of six cities in the Gulf Freeway area stretching from Galveston in the south, to League City in the north. Any model created to solve the problem of evacuating a large number of people in a short time would need to account for real world complexities, such as multiple on-ramps, carrying capacities of highways, and the time required to close on-ramps in an emergency situation. Read more…
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…
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: 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: MCI Communications Corp.
Team: Mona Abou-Sayed, Charlene Edwards, Scott Singleton
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1995
Documents: Final report
This project involved developing an optimized telecommunications-network design for a client of MCI Communications Corp. Requirements included determining the optimum number of nodes, their placement, and Digital Signal 3 (DS-3) lines need ed to connect all the cities and meet their demands while providing restoration capacity in the case of system component failures.
Several heuristics were used to find the initial placement of nodes and begin a cost minimization analysis. A mixed-integer programming model was developed and solved with Cplex, followed by manual adjustments to the node location assignments and network links. The optimal cost was found to be: $4,461,868, which could be improved with further development.
Client: North Texas Food Bank
Client: US Treasury-Federal Reserve Bank 
Client: Dallas Police Department
Client: Towers Perrin, TeePee Convenience Stores
Client: MCI Communications Corp.