Out of thirty teams of undergraduate students in the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE), The Home Depot team took home first place at the Spring 2015 Senior Design Competition. The Home Depot team was among five finalists first chosen at the Capstone Expo, held on April 23 at McCamish Pavilion, to go on and present their projects at the ISyE Senior Design Competition on April 29. The other four finalists were senior design teams who worked with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Energy Dispatch, Phillips 66, and United Parcel Services (UPS).

The Home Depot Senior Design team developed an optimization tool that will allow The Home Depot to reduce seasonal product import transportation costs by 18%. The tool provides a standardized method for planning the containerization of products such that each container is maximally utilized and shipped on the most cost-effective date. Students include Audrey Shlapak, Mala Morjaria, Alex Hovancik, Sean Moore, Casey Ferguson, Kelly Kujawa, Haley Hahmann, and Wood Alter, advised by Dean's Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow Shabbir Ahmed.

In light of the recent Ebola outbreak, the CDC Senior Design team focused on how treatment facilities were critical to stopping the epidemic, but beds were largely unavailable in some areas and went unused in others. Thus, they built a simulation to project the spread of cases within Guinea, overlaid with heuristics to trigger when and where to place treatment facilities. Their results showed that an additional 2,000 lives and $25 million could have been saved if Ebola Treatment Units were set up quickly or if health centers had been built in advance in densely populated areas. The teamincludes students Javeria Javeria, Kimberly Adelaar, Charmaine Chan, Matthew Daniels, Caleb Mbuvi, Chu Qian, Ivan Renaldi, and Jonathon Sutomo and were advised by Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor Julie Swann.

The Energy Dispatch Senior design team focused their project on truck scheduling and fuel inventory management with an emphasis on reducing excessive travel by assigning drivers to handle certain deliveries. The team provided an optimization model to better schedule deliveries and assign trucks to gas stations, as well as a combination of a demand forecasting model and an inventory policy to manage store fuel inventory. By providing a user interface that integrates these models, annual transportation costs and inventory holding costs are drastically reduced to provide savings of an upwards of $5.8 million per year. Students include Rohan Aggarwal, Hye Bae, Jacob Evans, Nathaniel Jones, Zubbia Saeed, and William Seo, and were advised by Director of Student Services, Dima Nazzal

The Phillips 66 Senior Design team focused on making a Los Angeles refinery’s distribution network more efficient. The team chose a location for a new distribution center that will be closer to their customer base, as well as calculating optimal inventory levels for the new DC. Their solution reduces expected inventory costs by 70%, transportation costs by 35%, and increases fill rate by 16%. The team of students includes Connor Zendt, Taylor Fairey, Alex Edson, Jennifer Taylor, Kyle Kenney, and Victoria Jones, and were led by their advisor, Director of Student Services, Dima Nazzal.

The UPS team proposed their project on measuring and incentivizing call quality. The specific call center their project focuses on is in Clark, Philippines. The center, comprised of 750 employees with 30,000 calls handled daily, experienced reduced quality and high costs resulting from the flawed incentives offered to its customer service representatives. Their project redesigned the entire Clark incentive program to drive improvements in employee behavior, call quality, and cost savings. UPS should see improved call quality and increased retention of top performers while streamlining costs by over $100,000. Team members include Katherine Marchand, Samay Jhunjhunwalla, Conrad Rybka, Jeffrey Allen, Angad Chawla, Bianca Palacio, and Maria Samuel, and were advised by Fouts Family Associate Professor Joel Sokol.