OREM 4395 – Senior Design Archive

Client: Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic
Team: Shorjoe Bhattacharya and Harvey Hauw
Faculty Advisors:  Drs. Barr, Bing         Year: 2017
Documents: Presentation, Report

Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic, located in West Dallas, offers services in many different healthcare areas including pediatric care, behavioral health, and obstetrics. The focus of this project was in the obstetrics department, at which patient satisfaction was dropping due to long wait times leading to long appointment durations.

Our team was tasked with collecting time and motion data, mapping out current workflows of the clinic, running a simulation model, and analyzing the results. We collected data with a simple yet effective time and motion study where we asked the individual patients to log their times as they went station to station in the clinic. We also learned the workflows and layout of the clinic by talking to staff members at the location. This was data was used in a computer simulation model of the Obstetrics wing, developed using “MedModel” (specialty healthcare facilities simulation software). The simulation results revealed ways to reduce patient wait times to improve the patient experience at LBUCC.

Senior design project featured (click to view)

NBC Channel 5 news story: Southern Methodist University students focus their project on making the intersection of Fitzhugh and Travis streets in Dallas safer for pedestrians. Senior Design team Andrew Brunts, Hailey Phelps, and David Smith built a simulation of Fitzhugh Avenue traffic to evaluate configuration alternatives for a neighborhood improvement organization.

Client: Frito Lay
Team: Rodrigo Cantu, Sergio Hueck, Rafael Virzi
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2012
Documents: Presentation, Report, Video

Gamesa, a subsidiary of Frito-Lay, is a Mexican Cookie company that sells its product in many different countries, including the United States. Their products, which includes different types of cookies and crackers, are targeted to the Mexican population. The company’s United States sales force consists of 38 representatives in 16 different regions, organized by their different routes to market, location of warehouses, and population density. Today, they dominate the U.s. Hispanic cookie market occupying 50 percent of the market.

The problem we address for Gamesa is: should they should deploy more sales representatives and, if so, where would their optimal locations be? With the current economic recession and the entering of Gamesa’s main competitor, Bimbo, sales have been dropping in the different regions. This resulted in Gamesa asking themselves if they needed a bigger sales force. They also wanted to know what regions could be good to add representatives in the future depending on the migration of the population or the strategy of the competition. Read more…

Client: Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control
Team: Stephen Beckert, Brandon Joslin, Pierce, Meier
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Barr
Year: 2010
Documents: Final Report, Presentation

Lockheed Martin presented us with a project more exciting than we could ever imagine: aiding the research into ways to model the effects of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). EMP is extremely devastating and can be caused by both natural and man-made events. EMP primarily affects electronic devices, rendering them useless or destroyed. Since the United States is heavily dependent on electronic interfaces, we are extremely vulnerable to this effect. In addition to this vulnerability to the EMP effect, the United States has a complex system of connected critical infrastructures that have not been studied as interrelated systems. This presents a major problem, how can one forecast the possible failures of such a massive complex system? 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…

Client: CEE Prof. Abdelghani
Team:  Nora Shora, Laura Tatsch
Faculty advisor: Barr   Year: 2006
Documents: Final report (Word), final presentation (PPT)

Many cities across the world have experienced, and are currently experiencing, increased traffic on highways and urban networks.  At the same time, roads and highways have a limited capacity and are only capable of transporting a limited number of travelers. An increase in the number of travelers has increased all of the following factors associated with travel: travel time, number of stops, travel costs, delays, air pollution, accidents, and noise level.

Road pricing is one tactic used as an effective demand management strategy to reduce traffic congestion and improve performance during peak periods in many cities. In our simulation model of Knoxville, TN we added tolls to certain roads in the network in order to acquire data that would help us distinguish whether changing tolls during peak hours would improve average travel time. 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: 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: Baylor University Medical Center
Team:  Amy Haller, Chris Johnson, Christian Puryear, Adam Saucedo
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr     Year: 1996
Documents:   Final report

Baylor University Medical Center (BUMC) is a downtown-Dallas-based hos­pital with many satellite locations around the metroplex. In northeast Tarrant county, BIJMC acquired a small hospital in Grapevine. The Grapevine Hos­pital is a licensed 104-bed facility offering both in- and out-patient services. The Emergency Department (ED) at Baylor Grapevine is a six-bed unit cater­ing primarily to urgent patients rather than trauma patients. Currently, this department is undergoing major changes in staffing and physical size. A new facility is under construction and will be completed in September 1996.

The administrators of the Grapevine Hospital recognized a potential prob­lem and requested a tool to accurately simulate the work done in the ED. The purpose of this project is two-fold: 1) to determine the impact of staffing and/or facility changes on the efficiency of the ED, and 2) to gain a better understand­ing of the patient flow through the ED in order to reduce the occurrence of bottlenecks in the new facility. Consistently, the ED sees its largest number of patients on the weekend. On average, the ED services 110 patients each weekend.

Client: Baylor Heart Hospital
Team: Ashley Backwith, Steven Chapman, Ikechukwu Irozura, Kelly Nelson, Josh Urquhart
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Barr     Year: 1998
Documents:   Final report

Baylor University Medical Center, a five-hospital complex located just north of downtown Dallas, is one of the leading tertiary care teaching and referral centers in Texas and the Southwest. Our project focused on the planned heart hospital, which is to be built across Worth Street from the main hospital tower. This eight-story facility would be financed and run jointly by Baylor and three major cardiac physician groups. The third floor of the hospital would house the cathology and electrophysiology labs that provide diagnostic tests and host several non-emergency procedures.

A team consisting of Baylor employees and the Healthcare Environmental Design architectural firm has been working on the floor plan and design of this facility. Since the project involves multi-million dollar expenditures from both the physicians and the hospital, and tasks that are vital to the welfare of cardiology patients will be performed there, the two sponsors want to insure the facility can handle the expected patient flow in the new heart hospital. As a result, our team has been asked to collect data, run a simulation for the new facility, and analyze the results. Read more…