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: 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: Lennox Industries
Team: Diana Batten, Maddie Kamp
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siems
Year: 2011
Documents: Final Report, Presentation
Lennox Industries is a residential and commercial heating and air-conditioning company with a 13-15% market share in about 80 countries. Lennox is unique in that they operate as both the manufacturer and distributor of their products selling directly to their customers, typically contractors.
This project identified correlations between customers’ buying patterns and their attrition, or loss of their business. Based on transaction-level data of 4,500 customers over a three-year period, an early-warning model was developed to signal the potential loss of a customer and enable Lennox to act preemptively. The analytics were based on a ranking procedure based on key indicators and a Markov chain analysis with categorical transition probabilities derived from historical data. With this model encapsulated in spreadsheet form with the ability to customize the analysis geographically and seasonally, the results give Lennox management a new tool to maintain their current customers and evaluate new markets.
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…
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: Raytheon Corp.
Team: Ellen Cieszkiewicz, Chuck Haley, Heather Schofield
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 2008
Documents: Final report, final presentation
Raytheon supplies its customers, mainly the government, with programs they utilize for important projects. It is Raytheon’s job to not only purchase these programs but also keep them regularly updated. Some of the software vendors that Raytheon purchases licenses from include but are not limited to Sun Microsystems, Adobe and Oracle. Needed is a means of optimizing the licensing plan, which might save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Read more…