Partnered with Benchmark Electronics, our team worked on three assembly lines throughout our year project. Two lines focused on gathering essential information to complete a capacity model. The last concentrated on developing a production line supporting three products and implementing lean tools.

The purpose of this Capstone project was to develop and integrate a specific customer group focused service center into the existing Company facility. This service center would need to be capable of completing at least 9 asset repairs a month, a 60 day or less repair turnaround time, an 80% repair success rate, utilize existing available space within the company facility, and not interfere with the other existing day-to-day core activities that take place. The staffing model for the service center would be developed utilizing the existing field service personnel within the Company.

The company that I’m working with is seeing a huge increase in demand for welded products over the next three years. This large increase in demand will drive significant increases weld production. To compound this issue, the country is looking at a huge shortage of skilled welders over the next five years. Because of these two compounding factors, we must find an automated solution to produce the weldments that we will need to meet customer demand.

Our capstone team worked with Legends Furniture on improving the shipping and receiving pipeline. We have created a forecasting model for the company to use, created a tool to optimize ordering, consolidated documents related to the supply chain, and integrated the forecasting model with their existing inventory management system.

Testing project management programs, Traction and EngineRoom, and how these programs can facilitate lean and six sigma thinking within City of Goodyear.

Two Products were designed and made using a Computer-Integrated Manufacturing System and both products did not need any human interaction. One design was made with two units, and they would go into the mill and the lathe separately, while the other was one unit that goes into both the mill and lathe. Process times for both products were compared without any optimization and afterward it was compared at scale while both processes were optimized.

The City of Goodyear (COGY) has established a plan to streamline the process of obtaining building permit approvals for developers. The current approach is made up of two unique processes that generate different results at different periods. The goal of the project is to provide the client a single approval to make the process as simple as possible.

Our team, the City of Goodyear Safety Management team, was tasked with helping the city achieve Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) certification, a highly rigorous program that prioritizes safety standards. The steps we took towards this goal included creating organizational awareness of VPP and standardizing both the files and the audit system itself. We were able to move towards our goal by creating educational material for employees, renaming thousands of inspection files, launching a new audit system, and creating inspection templates there.

The novel coronavirus brought an unprecedented sense of urgency for vaccination across the globe. Our team worked with Dr. Giulia Pedrielli -- with the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University -- to simulate six point-of-dispensing (POD) sites in Maricopa County, AZ. The objective was to determine, through experimentation of a simulation model, the optimal operational configuration of a POD for efficiency (high throughput, low waste, low time in system) of COVID-19 vaccination.

The Empire Southwest Capstone team was placed in charge of drafting where best to implement two automated BOTs within the same process. The reason to implement these BOTs is due to the process taking too long and being too repetitive. The team was given two semesters, and spent an estimated one semester per BOT.

Project coordination workflow is a critical component to the success of engineering services projects. The main objective of this tool is to improve project workflow efficiency by keeping project teams on track and aware of overall project coordination throughout the duration of a project. The tool is a web-based interface that includes MEP coordination checklists for each project phase and a chart of dependencies to track which items need to be received to meet project deliverables on time or to complete dependent tasks.

The Honeywell project focuses on formalizing a method for defining, assessing, and monitoring the impact of valve hardware characteristics on component level and system level. Furthermore, this is to improve dynamic performance and stability as well as minimize overall cost. This can obtained by designing a method that can be applied to the bleed air and all systems after that, achieved by visualizing it as a Process Map, then formed into a Cost Model.

Our project involves COVID-19’s impact on the manufacturing for DCNdx, a biotechnical company that produces diagnostic testing kits for various applications. We will analysis the impact and introduction of COVID-19 safety measures to protect manufacturing site employees. We will investigate how the COVID-19 safety measures have evolved over the past year and half. Lastly, we will discuss the production changes, scarcity of resources, and the economic pressures that caused our project to change course during the last year.

Intentional Foods Café is expanding into the market and requires help in creating and opening a proper production kitchen. The Production Capacity team will assist Ned in designing and launching a production kitchen suited for mass production.

The Crossing, a Christian megachurch, identified that attendance on its own is an inadequate measure of attendee engagement. As the staff Database Coordinator, I worked with the executive pastor of operations and a cross-functional team of staff members to identify new engagement key performance indicators. With the criteria from these new KPIs, we created a methodology for collecting, storing, and presenting attendee engagement data.

Nelson Steel Products, a wire mill in business for over 40 years, is widely recognized for its quality product, agility, and best-in-class customer service. The company’s current operations management system is built on outdated technology which negatively impacts cycle time, process speed, and data availability. The purpose of this project is to identify a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to improve management processes and increase opportunities for growth.

Implementation of Lean and Six Sigma Methodologies in BPO Projects

The ASU IEE 486 Capstone Team was assigned this project to reduce the overall duration for Make-A-Wish Foundation's two Financial workstreams - National Finance Group and Shared Financial Services. The team used Lean Six Sigma engineering methodologies in order to recommend both short term and long term solutions for continuous improvement.

Our project goal to help Intentional Foods Cafe & Market Expand its business through various avenues on campus at ASU, Tempe. Our initial requirements are to find ASU Food Services Contact and connect contact, Aramark, with Intentional Foods for a pitch. This project is unique because the team is working with a small business with start up concepts, as oppose to working with an established corporation.

Connect Invest was approved to sell $75 million of short term notes to investors. I was instructed to build a sales and forecasting model to help the company asses their risk and liability.

Sponsors or Mentors:
Diana Caldren

As project manager I managed the design and installation of Audio-Visual conferencing systems for 2 floors of a new office building being built from the ground up. To do this I guided a team of professionals through a planning process including scope management, schedule management and risk management. I also supervised the physical installation and served alongside the salesman as the customer point of contact.

In this capstone project, students from both Arizona State University and Tecnologico de Monterrey- Hermosillo Campus worked on three different projects for the pork meat manufacturing company Norson. Particularly, two of the ASU students were involved in Norson intrapreneurship center, CIDN, working with Automation 4.0, one student was working within the structured capital of the company, and one student worked on a career plan project.

The primary objective of this project was to estimate the flow of 20-ounce plastic Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottles throughout Maricopa County in 2021 and visualize this flow with a Sankey diagram. A Sankey diagrams provides insight by visualizing the movement of plastic and informs toward targeting circular economy efforts, in which population alone may not be the best indicator of consumption. The consumption rates for each soft drink were sampled by inventory changes across a variety of locations (i.e. convenience and grocery stores) in the Maricopa County area over a set duration, and projecting these measurements across a broader geospatial area; and a statistical analysis of the demand results show major population proportional deviation from cities including Mesa, Gilbert, Buckeye, Chandler, and Gilbert--which may represent important cities to target recycling efforts.

Benchmark Electronics was experiencing a high amount of aged Work in Process (WIP) showing up on their reports. Using Lean Principles, this project looked into the entire production process to determine the root causes of aged WIP. Our team worked with a variety of departments to establish a prominent 5S + Safety system and incorporated other solutions to increase visibility.

This is a continuous improvement project. We are revising the cold work process to improve one of Rathbone's key product lines.

Using the principles of Lean and Six Sigma, this project looked to improve the process of medical records visit note compilation at a sleep medicine office. By doing this, we were able to make improvements to the backlog of visit notes, the number of errors on visit notes, and the amount of time it took to compile notes. This would prove beneficial to both patients and practitioners.

This project is to resolve significant project gaps and learning curves within the Support Equipment and Supply team at the F-22 Program Office. To address these problems a series of OneNote notebooks were created to gather, centralize, and present information. The Project Continuity notebook utilizes a template to standardize organization of information to be turned over while the Process and Program Continuity notebooks focus on defining and summarizing processes, procedures, tools, and the duties of team members.

While Quadmark excels in delivering quality content and video production, organization and management across all functional department needed improvement. Despite having certain organizational tools and methods, there is not a system in place to identify, analyze, and measure inputs of production into the current process regarding time and data. Implementing lean six sigma methodologies, conducting time studies, and creating project management content along with organizational charts was the main focus of the project. Through this project we were able to quantify, locate, and optimize areas of the process that previously contributed to waste

This is a Lean/ Six Sigma process improvement project with the goals to reduce risk to the Receiving Freight Process. We aim to reduce costs, improve quality, and reduce lead time for all tasks associated with the process.

The Total Health and Well-Being project is A New Leaf’s organization-wide process improvement initiative that started a few years ago to reach operational excellence “through resource coordination and sustainable support” in order to provide whole body care to the communities of Arizona. The project aims to break down territorial barriers by identifying similarities in A New Leaf programs’ work practice, focusing on opportunities for internal referrals across the organization’s service pillars. This is achieved through investigation and documentation of current process flows, identification of improvement opportunities, and high-level mapping of standardized future state workflows for a more unified workforce.

We worked with Walton sustainability solutions to create a spreadsheet database of concentrated animal feeding operations in indiana. Data collected on the CAFOs within the state of Indiana, and their respective water sources, were analyzed and correlated to generate a method for determining how many animals exist within any given CAFO.

The US Marine Corps demonstrated a need for improvements in the cargo handling process. The project’s objective was to simplify the process of downsizing large pallets from large aircraft (such as the Hercules C-130) onto smaller pallets on smaller aircraft (such as the Osprey aircraft/Helicopter). The sponsor’s request was to find a solution to the cargo downsizing process..