OREM 4395 – Senior Design Archive

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…

Team: Kathryn Gotcher, Kyle Merino, Gregory Moran
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems   Year: 2009
Documents: Final Report (Word), Final Presentation (PPT)

In the present global economic state, finding ways to improve a nation’s economy is vital to government leaders. The problem presented to us was to study various political institutions and policies of the world’s nations and determine which measures, if any, are accurate predictors of economic health and growth. In particular, we were interested in the effect that measures of free trade would have upon the economy. 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…