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: Williams Technologies, Inc.
Team: Erik Wikstrom, Jeff Cate
Faculty advisor: Dr. Barr Year: 1996
Documents: Final report (PDF)
Williams Technologies Incorporated (WTI), intends to increase customer satisfaction by decreasing time-to-market of its products, namely re-manufactured transmissions. WTI believes this goal can be accomplished by developing a more efficient shipping system, while minimizing the cost-to-market. This new system may be developed in-house or outsourced. Therefore, WTI needs an in-house solution that can be compared to those submitted by outside sources. Read more…
Award Winner: Omega Rho National
Student Project Competition
Client: Quest Resource, Inc.
Team: John Jarvis, Claudia Johnson, Liana Vetter
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
Currently, Quest guarantees about 85% of its gas through monthly contracts, while selling the remaining at the daily price. The amount to guarantee per sale point per month is a major decision within Quest. The motivation for Quest to optimize this process is two-fold. First, by paying close attention to past production, optimization can help assure that Quest will rarely produce under their monthly guarantee and will never incur a penalty for that underproduction. Second, through researching the historical relationship between Quest’s contract prices and the corresponding market prices for each month, Quest can better estimate the contract volume that will maximize revenue. Read more…
Client: American Airlines Center
Team: Andrew Conway, Marcos Garza, Tabatha G. Olaechea, Jennifer Keen, Marcus Wentrck
Faculty advisor: Barr Year: 2004
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)
The American Airlines Center is a dual – purpose facility; they house the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks as well as the NHL’s Dallas Stars and must accommodate them both through out their respective seasons. The AAC is setup to change back and forth to both set ups. Making a quicker transition time when switching from a basketball court to a hockey rink would decrease scheduling conflicts between the two teams, and possibly allow for an increase in other sports; and non-sporting (i.e. concerts, seminars, rodeos, etc.) events to take place in the arena. This could potentially increase revenue for the AAC. As of right now they do not make much money on the Maverick’s and Star’s games, so by decreasing changeover time, they would be able to bring in other venues to increase the amount of money they make in a fiscal year.
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…
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…
