DETERMINING OPTIMAL SURGICAL OPERATING HOURS AT MEMORIAL SLOAN KETTERING CANCER CENTER
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Department of Surgery comprises over 100 surgeons and 39 operating rooms (ORs) dedicated to providing patients with world-class cancer care. Currently, the Chiefs of Surgery determine the operating hours for the ORs based on past experience. This manual process reduces the certainty of surgical team schedules, specifically that of nurses. Our decision support tool uses end-to-end analytics trained on historical surgical case data to optimize OR operating hours. Reducing both overutilization and underutilization of staffed ORs improves nurse schedule certainty.
ALUMNIZE: AN ALUMNI MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Alumnize is an end-to-end system that allows university departments to extract, transform and load their alumni career information for analysis. The Department of Management Sciences currently does not have a database for Management Engineering alumni. The time taken to gather this data is increasing with the number of graduating cohorts. The analysis from Alumnize is used to better market the program to potential students. Insights from the analysis can also support data-driven program changes to adapt with market demands.
COLLECT: AUTOMATING COURIER COMPANIES’ RECEIVING PROCESS
The courier and shipping industry generates 248 billion USD annually and continues to grow with the increase of global trade. Receiving items and processing these items for shipment remains a bottleneck in this industry due to manual labor. Our solution integrates the collection of images and product information with an easy to use interface to produce tracking information with the press of a button. COLLECT eliminates a significant bottleneck by automating the receiving process.
TA WORKS: IMPROVING END-TO-END TA ASSIGNMENT PROCESS
The University of Waterloo works to ensure courses are taught by the most qualified Teaching Assistants. Each term, the Management Sciences Department goes through a lengthy process of assigning Teaching Assistants to courses. TA works is a new system that is proven to shorten the length of this process while creating a higher quality TA to course match. To obtain these results an end-to-end application system for Teaching Assistants, Professors and Administrators has been developed with an improved TA to course matching algorithm.
PICKSTA: AN IOS APP TO HELP USERS WITH THEIR PICTURE SELECTION PROCESS
It is now cheaper and easier to take pictures due to the availability of high quality cameras on mobile devices, therefore, people are taking far more photographs than ever before. Individuals sort through masses of pictures in order to share with friends and family, which is an extremely time-consuming process. Picksta is an iOS application that takes users through a series of steps that involve grouping algorithms, narrow down functionality and side by side comparison to aid users in deciding on a final picture.
PISTACHIO: WE MAKE TRIP PLANNING EASIER
Planning for a trip can be tedious, as it requires cross-referencing multiple platforms to create an itinerary. Planning a trip with a group of friends is even more difficult, since everyone’s preferences must be taken into account as well. Pistachio is a travel application for groups of travelers, allowing users to collaborate and democratically vote for attractions that will be visited throughout a trip. The result is a carefully optimized itinerary, calculated by considering constraints such as location, distances, operating hours, and user preferences
OVERTIME COST REDUCTION THROUGH PERFORMANCE-BASED PAY STRUCTURES
Shanghai Whitecat Special Chemical Co. is a manufacturer of commercial chemical products with approximately 30 production workers. The current pay structure is a base salary with overtime pay dependent on extra hours worked. This leads to employees working in an inefficient manner to increase overtime salary. To resolve this issue, the recommendation will be an implementation of a performance based pay structure with various metrics to fairly determine salaries. The recommendation consists of a choice of three models to best fit the company’s needs. The estimated saving for overtime cost is 5-10%
DATA HERO: BRIDGING THE DATA-CENTERED SKILLS GAP
Data-centered fields have been growing at exponential rates over the past few years. The sudden surge in demand and the lack of supply for professionals with the required skills have created a gap that will continue to grow if not addressed. Data Hero is a platform that allows job-seekers who would like to enter a data-centered field to enhance their existing skills and develop the ones they lack. The platform produces a personalized learning plan for available online courses based on the user input.
MOVE YOUR MIND: PROVIDING TAILORED ACTIVITY SUGGESTIONS
Move Your Mind is an organization on campus that helps students suffering from mood disorders (depression,anxiety) get physically active. It has become increasingly difficult for the Move Your Mind staff to understand how successful their participants are. Working with this organization, our team developed an application within uWaterloo Portal that uses data mining techniques to help provide physical activity suggestions based on participants’ personal characteristics. In addition, the application calculates program metrics to help the staff understand how the participants are progressing through the program.
RAPID PERFORMANCE: A VISUALIZATION ON JOB SHOP STATISTICS
Rapid Gear is a manufacturing company that designs, manufactures and repairs gears in a job shop operation. The company faces challenges when creating a production schedule. Scheduling is currently completed manually by the production lead, and decisions are solely based off intuition. The solution focuses on building a decision support system to increase the visibility of the job shop and aid in production scheduling. This will provide the production lead a data-driven approach to scheduling with increased accuracy in estimating order completion dates for customers.
A WAREHOUSE AS/RS IMPLEMENTATION AT UPS LOGISTICS
UPS is an international shipping and delivery company. At their David Hunting Drive facility in Mississauga, they provide third-party logistics and storage solutions for their business clients. Currently, the process to retrieve items from the warehouse is time-consuming and represents a potential area for improvement. By adjusting the layout of the warehouse and using automated technology, the warehouse will be able to operate at a higher level of efficiency with lower costs while meeting customers’ demand.