About

Starting Semester: Fall 2026
Assigned: No
Location: TUCKER

Vision Metals, LLC

Client Profile

Vision Metals, LLC operates a 40,000 sf flatroll steel service center located in Tucker, GA. The company processes various types of steel coils on-site with its 50,000# capacity slitter according to customer specific requirements. Additionally, the company purchases, inventories, and sells steel sheets and plate sourced primarily from steel mills and other metal distributors. Vision Metals, LLC operates inside a niche market focused on excess and secondary steel. These items are offered directly or through a bidding process as either obsolete inventory, outside the user's specifications, or not acceptable for the intended purpose due to a defect. Vision Metals, LLC repurposes these items by selling to customers where the quality of the steel is acceptable for that customer's needs. The list of customers includes product manufacturers, construction related entities, and other metals distributors.

Project Description

The steel market regularly experiences pricing volatility due to market supply and demand dynamics, steel mill operating levels, steel mill and service center consolidations, government policy (e.g., tariffs), steel import volume, etc. Accordingly, there are benchmark pricing mechanism designed to help establish consistent contractual pricing and provide market transparency. Inventory management, especially in a niche business, is a key component of managing risk while also leveraging opportunities. Opportunistic purchasing is a large part the company's business model. However, identifying the optimal times to purchase more or less volume has been done empirically. The owners of Vision Metals, LLC would like to take a deeper dive into purchasing optimization using a more analytical approach from market available benchmark pricing trends alongside the accumulation of company-specific historical data including purchasing volume, inventory levels, selling prices, gross profit, processing volumes, etc.

Skills

Data Analytics
Modeling and Benchmarking
Inventory process flow
PDF conversion to an analytically compatible format

Data Access Requirement