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All ISyE undergraduate seniors culminate their undergraduate educational experiences with a capstone course called Senior Design. In Senior Design, you are presented with an opportunity to work with a team of undergraduate students to provide your organization with a variety of innovative and creative solutions to a problem. Student teams work on well-defined, specific design projects to generate, evaluate, and communicate solutions to their client. For more information about the Senior Design program, contact Senior Design Coordinator Dr. Dima Nazzal.
Senior Design Facts at a Glance
Projects per year
Clients per year
Students per year
Faculty per year
Sample Project Topics
- Activity valuation
- Capacity management
- Customer service enhancement
- Demand/price forecasting
- Distribution network redesign
- Energy usage reduction
- Equipment replacement planning
- Faculty layout/redesign
- Flow management
- Inventory planning
- Manufacturing line/cell design
- Materials handling
- Money/capital management
- Pricing strategy
- Preventative maintenance scheduling
- Process design/redesign
- Production scheduling
- Supply chain design
- Technology integration
- Vendor selection
- Waste reduction
- Workforce scheduling
Project Requirements
- Engineering Design
The project must involve a recommendation for change(s) to an existing system or the development of a new system and an economic analysis of the associated costs and benefits. - Magnitude
Each team member is expected to spend a minimum of 12 productive hours per week on the project for a total of 180 hours for the semester, which equates to a minimum of 1080 hours for a six-member team. The project’s scope must be consistent with this expectation. - Value
The value of the project to the client must be commensurate with the amount of time spent. - Methodology
The project must require the use of substantial industrial and systems engineering tools and methods learned in the curriculum.
Client Responsibilities
- Identify a real need the organization is facing.
- Ensure that there is significant design content in the proposed project; that is, the scope of the project must be such that a recommendation for a change to a system is made and there is demonstrated value for implementing the change, and that it has a significant impact on the organization.
- Meet with the student team on the site at the facility to explore possibilities, and determine the scope of the project.
- Assign a responsible technical or managerial person to give the team appropriate guidance, operations and economic information, and site access if needed. During the semester, this person will need to spend approximately 2-4 hours per week interacting with team members.
- Make arrangements for an appropriate level of management to receive and consider the team's formal proposal, interim report, tentative results, conclusions, and final design.
Cohorts and Timeline
We have two cohorts per academic year: Summer/Fall and Fall/Spring. Each cohort engages with the clients throughout two academic semesters. The first semester is "pre-senior design", which is the semester prior to "senior design". In pre-senior design, students form/join teams, search for a client and develop their project scope by writing a pre-proposal for faculty approval. No work on the project is expected during that first semester. Teams with pre-proposals that are well-written and meet the outlined criteria above are given the permit to register in the second semester for "senior design", which is the semester where the actual analysis and design is conducted under the supervision of a faculty advisor. All work products are evaluated by a faculty examiner.
Ideal submission window for the summer/fall cohort projects is March through May.
Ideal submission window for the fall/spring cohort projects is July through September.
Summer/Fall Cohort Pre-senior Design Timeline
Summer 2024
- April 22, Students submit Team composition, many students have already formed their teams and working on finding projects/clients.
- May 29, Teams submit Client Notification memo, describing their client, the project motivation, potential opportunity, and connection to ISyE courses and methods.
- June 24, Teams submit a preliminary proposal, 7-10 page document describing the client need, the current operation, the opportunities to address the client’s need, the information and data they need to gather to further develop their opportunities, the potential deliverables, the potential value to the client, and the link between the project and the IE curriculum.
- July 23, Teams submit their revised preliminary proposals; teams rarely get a well-defined document on the first try. I usually meet with them after the first pre-proposal submission to help them develop their understanding of the current system and potential opportunities.
Summer/Fall Cohort Senior Design Timeline
Fall 2024
- Aug 19, Semester starts
- Aug 26 - 30, Proposal presentations to faculty
- Sept 3 - 6, Proposal presentations to client
- Oct 14 - 18, Interim progress presentations to faculty
- Oct 21 - 25, Interim progress presentations to clients
- Nov 26 - 29, Final presentations to faculty
- Dec 2 - Dec 10, Final presentations and written report to clients
- Dec 2, GT Capstone Expo
- Dec 10, ISyE Best of Senior Design Finalists Lunch and Presentations
- Dec 13, Semester ends - Deadline for submitting all deliverables and code to client
Fall/Spring Cohort Pre-Senior Design Timeline
Fall 2023
- September 18, Students submit Team composition, many students have already formed their teams and working on finding projects/clients.
- Oct 2, Teams submit Client Notification memo, describing their client, the project motivation, potential opportunity, and connection to ISyE courses and methods.
- Oct 23, Teams submit a preliminary proposal, 7-10 page document describing the client need, the current operation, the opportunities to address the client’s need, the information and data they need to gather to further develop their opportunities, the potential deliverables, the potential value to the client, and the link between the project and the IE curriculum.
- Nov 6, Teams submit their revised preliminary proposals; teams rarely get a well-defined document on the first try. I usually meet with them after the first pre-proposal submission to help them develop their understanding of the current system and potential opportunities.
Fall/Spring Cohort Senior Design Timeline
Spring 2024
- Jan 8, Semester starts
- Jan 15 - 19, Proposal presentations to faculty
- Jan 22 - 26, Proposal presentations to client
- Mar 4 - 8, Interim progress presentations to faculty
- Mar 11 - 15, Interim progress presentations to clients
- Apr 15 - 19, Final presentations to faculty
- Apr 22 - 30, Final presentations and written report to clients
- Apr 23, GT Capstone Expo
- Apr 30, ISyE Best of Senior Design Finalists Lunch and Presentations
- May 3, Semester ends - Deadline for submitting all deliverables and code to client
Steps For Project Submission
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Projects can be submitted online.
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New clients are encouraged to meet with Program Coordinator, Dr. Dima Nazzal, prior to project submission. Necessary fields include: Organization, organization type, profile, and web address; first and last name of submitter, contact information of submitter; and how you learned about senior design projects. Examples can also be found on the website.
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Project submissions are reviewed by the Program Coordinator prior to being published for student team selection.
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Following project publication, companies should expect to be contacted by student teams with their resumes.
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Each team picks its project from the submitted projects that comply with the course objectives; if multiple teams pick your project, you can choose among them.
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Senior Design Project Listing
Fall 2023 Winning Team
Client: The Home Depot
Project: Less Shrinking More Doing
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Siva Theja Maguluri
Student Team: Eva Hobson | Lindsey Jerome | Audrey Johnson | Maddy Mazurik | Alexandra Rachman | Grace Saad | Adam Mualem | Alex Varghese
Description:
The Home Depot, the world’s largest home improvement retailer, is facing a big issue: shrink. Shrink, the loss of inventory through operational error or theft, has grown at Home Depot since 2018, costing the company millions. Shrink can occur in many places in Home Depot but commonly occurs at self-checkout (SCO). SCO is intended to be unassisted, making it particularly vulnerable to shrink, but associates can intervene on transactions when prompted, such as for an item that needs measurement. Associates are much more accurate while scanning than customers, meaning an associate intervention is likely to capture shrink.
Our goal was to provide a solution that minimizes shrink loss at SCO by associate intervention while considering labor costs and customer satisfaction. We achieved this through two deliverables: the Optimization Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the Point of Sale (POS) intervention Flag. The Optimization GUI is a proactive tool to reduce shrink; it calculates the store's optimal intervention threshold and finds projections for savings and other key metrics when associates optimally intervene. The POS Intervention Flag is the reactive tool used live at the register to trigger interventions. It identifies transactions with predicted shrink over the optmal interventionton threshold in real-tme, flagging them and prompting associate intervention to capture shrink.
Finalist Presentations
Sponsors & Partners
Giving Opportunities
For Permanent Endowment
- Named Senior Design Program from $250,000 *
- General Program Support from $25,000
For Current Operations
- Senior Design Team Corporate Sponsorship from $5,000
* Naming rights are limited to non-organizational entities and must be approved by the Georgia Tech Name Committee.
Sponsor Benefits
- Student recruiting and mentoring opportunities
- Potential solution to your challenge - designed, built, and tested
- Company logo displayed at McCamish Pavilion for Expo
- Company logo displayed on Georgia Tech Capstone Design website