Work-based learning and community engagement (MSBA Applied Projects) are at the core of our mission in the Milgard Center for Business Analytics (CBA). And it’s no surprise that our Center is a leader at UW Tacoma on community engagement projects. In this post, I will share with you a high-level overview of the nearly 60 projects our students and faculty in the CBA have worked on to date. In future posts, I’ll share more details on the projects categorized by specific sectors and business problems that we are addressing using contemporary business analytics tools and expertise.
The CBA engages with the community on projects in several ways. Under the program management of the CBA, our Master of Science of Business Analytics (MSBA) students conduct an applied project with local, national and international businesses and organizations that are seeking data-driven insights to solve their strategic business problems using applied data analytics tools and smart technologies as part of earning their MSBA degree. The CBA also engages with the community on sponsored / paid projects. Lastly, our Analytics Innovations (AI) Student club engages with our community by volunteering on projects that deliver social good to our Tacoma community partners.
The CBA has led nearly 60 community engagement projects in the past four years. The CBA’s MSBA program alone has conducted 51 community engagement projects in partnership with our 214 MSBA students. Here is an overview of the MSBA projects, both past and present:
During AY20-21, two cohorts of 73 MSBA student consultants are currently working on 14 community engagement projects with the following organizations: CHI Franciscan, Greentrike, City of Lynnwood, City of Tacoma, Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Sound Credit Union, Metropolitan Appliance, City of Tacoma Fire Department, Schnitzer, South Tacoma Auto, University of Washington Tacoma, Communities in Schools of Tacoma, City of Puyallup, Korean Women’s Association.
Learn more about our current project with the City of Puyallup here.
During AY19-20, two cohorts of 76 MSBA student consultants worked on 20 community engagement projects with the following organizations: CHI Franciscan, Communities in Schools of Tacoma, Costco Whole Sale, Delta Air Lines INC., Harbor Wholesale Foods, Inc., IBM, Metropolitan Appliance, MultiCare Health System, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division, Keyport, Point Defiance Zoo, Providence St Joseph Health, Sound Credit Union, South Sound Military & Communities Partnership, Stellar Industrial Supply, Tacoma Power, Tacoma Public Schools, TCS World Travel, Washington State Department of Natural Resources, Hyundai Capital of America
During AY18-19, one cohort of 33 MSBA student consultants worked on 8 community engagement projects with the following organizations: CHI Franciscan, City of Tacoma, Columbia Bank, Harbor Wholesale Foods, Inc., Metro Parks Tacoma, Microsoft
During AY17-18, one cohort of 32 MSBA student consultants worked on 9 community engagement projects with the following organizations: Metro Parks of Tacoma, Data Central, Delta Analytics, CHI Franciscan Health, Stellar Industrial, SSMCP, Turnover Intelligence, Boeing
If you’d like to learn more about how the CBA can partner with your organization to deliver actionable insights from big data for smarter decision-making, please contact me at helsem@uw.edu
If you are interested in learning more about best practices when engaging with the community on projects, I’ll be sharing a blog post on this topic in the future as well.
High level overview of CBA’s Projects is provided below…
| Project Category | Project Type | Date | Organization Name | Project Title | Project Summary |
| Tacoma | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | Metro Parks Tacoma | Creation of a data warehouse platform | Develop a versatile Data Warehouse framework and implementation strategy that can normalize disparate data sources and enhance the process for connectivity, dashboarding, analysis, and data management for the Whole Child Access Pass program in partnership with Metro Parks. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | Metro Parks Tacoma | Creation of a revenue forecasting tool | The purpose of this project is to create a Power BI dashboard that combines actuals data from a Munis database with detailed budget information in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | City of Tacoma | Tool to help business assess the various costs and benefits of starting and operating a business in Tacoma | The purpose of the project is to build a prototype tool that showcases various costs involved in starting/operating a business depending on the business type, size and expected annual revenue. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Communities in Schools of Tacoma | Prediction of students that are likely to underperform in the future | Every year 1.2 million high school students drop out and about 25% of High School Freshman fail to graduate on time. This has a massive effect on the overall economy. In fact a 7% increase in the graduation rate for the Tacoma School District would result in a 68.7 million dollar increase in GDP This presentation looks at how our team used business analytics to address the areas of academic performance, donor interactions, and volunteer retention . We invite you to watch our presentation and see how Business analytics can transform an organization doing vital work helping at risk students. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Tacoma Power | Improve customer service through optimization of outage management analytics | Our 12-month MSBA Applied Project was Outage Management Analytics in partnership with Tacoma Power. Tacoma Power is a large public utility that operates 7 hydro-electric dams, generates 48% of its own electricity, and distributes power to 179,000 customers in Tacoma and surrounding communities. Our business problem centered around management of power outages and system reliability. Our data was sourced from Tacoma Power’s Outage Management System (OMS). Our project’s main objective is to facilitate a positive effect on the company’s system reliability with usage of Tableau reports and visualizations by dispatchers and management. A secondary objective is to explore the relationship between weather variables and system reliability. And our final objective was to explore managing customer expectations with cognitive analytics. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Tacoma Public Schools | Improving operations, revenue and customer satisfaction in rentals of facilities and fields | Tacoma Public Schools is one of the largest employers in Tacoma, with nearly 5,000 employees and serving 30,000 students. They manage over 140 buildings, stadiums, parks and other properties – – more than 5 million square feet of learning and administrative spaces — which are made available for public use after school hours. As an organization that seeks innovation and with a core value of data-driven decision making, they sought to leverage the power of technology to better understand their facility rental program. Learn how our data dashboard & analytics helps them assess its impacts to better serve their students and the Tacoma community. | |
| AI Club Project | AY19-20 | Korean Women’s Association | Implementation of an in-home care enterprise system | Implementation of an in-home care enterprise system | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Greentrike | The business of childcare in Pierce County | ||
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Korean Women’s Association | Implementation of In-Home Care Enterprise System | ||
| AI Club Project | AY20-21 | WA State Historical Society | Primary drivers of attendance at Annual Train Festival | ||
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Tacoma Fire Department | Predictive modeling for unit operations, specifically on behavioral health and substance abuse needs | ||
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | UW Tacoma | Strategies to improve student recruiting and retention | ||
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | CIS Tacoma | Analysis of current donor base and strategies to grow funding streams | ||
| Healthcare | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | CHI Franciscan | Robotic Surgery Schedule Optimization | Use business analytics methodologies to analyze and create a strategy for growth and investment in the robotics program and identifying what changes could be made to increase the utilization of the robots throughout the region |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | CHI Franciscan | Optimization of Surgery Room Utilization | Analyze the opportunities for addressing quality, safety, and capacity issues through the consolidation of surgical specialties to specific locations, exploring the idea of creating centers of excellence | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | CHI Franciscan | Predicting surgical demand volume | The purpose of this project is to utilize existing historical and personnel data to convert forecast surgical volume changes. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | CHI Franciscan | Estimation of revenue recoupment and risk resulting from Medicare inpatient hospital value-based programs | The purpose of this project is providing insight into estimated revenue recoupment and risk resulting from the HVBP. This will be accomplished through identifying deficiencies in performance across peers and metrics laid out by CHI Franciscan. Ultimately, we aim to improve CHI Franciscan’s ability to project the financial return on pre- and post-operative care coordination, their quality of care performance metrics, and their scores compare to nationwide hospital performance. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | CHI Franciscan | Optimization of patient flow to balance capacity across all CHI hospitals | To develop a tool that helps translate a Data Tile’s real-time data into historical trends in a way that would facilitate a response that would optimize patient flow and help balance capacity across all CHI locations. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Multicare | Reduction of emergency readmissions via a machine learning solution | Reducing emergency readmissions(ED) is an important metric of interest in the healthcare industry as it is one of the indicators of the quality of care provided by any healthcare organization. Unnecessary ED visits strain the health care system as they are not only expensive but also utilize resources that other individuals with more sensitive needs may require. Our healthcare organization considers this issue an immediate requirement and wanted to proactively address it. The goal of our project was to help them identify a small group, evaluate the risk factors such as the impact of chronic diseases and social determinants of health and provide a machine learning solution that helps them reduce their ED readmissions. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Providence St. Joseph Health | Create a machine learning model to predict the resolve time of service tickets for the IS department | Providence St. Joseph Health’s Information Services department was looking for ways to improve the satisfaction of the employees throughout the organization. Our MSBA project took place in two parts. We did survey analytics for executive surveys that were conducted, including sentiment analysis. The second part of our project was to create a machine learning model that would predict the resolve time of service tickets for the IS department. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | CHI Franciscan | Quantifying barriers that delay a patient’s discharge from the hospital system | ||
| Covid-19 | AI Club Project | AY19-20 | Washington State Economist | Replacement of the national Consumer Confidence Index with a localized index to assist with phased economic reopening plan | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | City of Puyallup | Strategies for economic reinvention post covid-19 | ||
| Cities | MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | City of Lynnwood | Conduct a park usage study on overall use, use patterns and demographics of park users | |
| Supply Chain/Operations | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | Boeing | Forecasting demand for flight deck windows | Create a model to recover and sustain flight deck window market growth and develop a tool to track and measure inventory recovery through continuing market growth strategy. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Delta Airlines | Optimization of flight scheduling at SeaTac Airport | Our goal was to develop innovative analytical solutions to aid in the optimization of flight scheduling. This included: descriptive and diagnostic analysis of past flights; regression and classification models to predict future arrival and departure activity; and incorporating those predictions into prototypes of prescriptive solutions to optimize flight schedules for key gates. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Naval Undersea Warfare Center Keyport | Optimization of Range maintenance prioritization | The Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Keyport (client) currently has limited reporting or visibility into the overall status of maintenance for the range. The management over Range Operations would like clear indicators of what maintenance is the priority. They would also like the ability to communicate or quantify impacts of delays in maintenance. Current customer requirements and budgetary constraints often impact or delay the ability of required maintenance to be performed. The client implemented a new system, Infor EAM v11.4 in 2018. Although they have been using the system for over a year there are known gaps in the data being input, and acknowledgement that the system is not being utilized to its fullest capabilities. They have requested an assessment of the use of the current software, additional modules not currently being used or enhancements to consider. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Schnitzer Steel | Improving shredder productivity by increasing throughput and reducing downtime | ||
| Human Resources | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | Delta Airlines | Retaining top talent | Develop and deploy a workforce analytics prototype that leverage’s Delta’s current workforce metrics and analytics platform to enhance the statistical modeling capabilities by implementing predictive and prescriptive methodologies. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | Turnover Intelligence | Impact of workforce commute | Assist Turnover Intelligence with the PreferCloser™ Launch by analyzing “people analytics” related to workforce commutes and its impact on employee performance and profit burdens to companies. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | South Tacoma Auto | Improving employee retention through predictive behavior analysis | ||
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | City of Tacoma HR | Use of data to better inform HR practices and city-wide initiatives | ||
| Sustainability | MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | Microsoft | Forecasting supplier carbon emission reductions | The purpose of this project is to develop a predictive model that will forecast supplier carbon emissions reductions based on historical data, allowing Microsoft to analyze current and future supplier emissions. This model will predict suppliers’ CO2 performance so that Microsoft can make decisions of resource allocation in accordance to which suppliers need to be monitored in order to be up to par on industry average emission targets. |
| FinTech | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-8 | Data Central | Virtual marketplace in the municipal bond market | Explore solutions to create an All-to-All virtual marketplace in the municipal bond market. Historical data together with the transparency of financial terms will become an invaluable tool for the investors to make an informed purchasing decision, and this will reduce risk and improve market liquidity. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | Columbia Bank | Predicting which customers that may close existing checking accounts | Develop data-driven processes to utilize digital marketing technology to increase customer retention and product engagement. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | Community Bank | Identifying and monitoring key risk metrics | The purpose of this project is to improve knowledge used in a community bank’s strategic decision making. This will be accomplished through the identification of an appropriate peer group for benchmarking and development of meaningful KRIs through sentiment analysis. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | IBM | Tools to improve the detection of money laundering while protecting and preserving privacy of financial data | The problem that the team worked to address for IBM was how to improve the detection of money laundering and other financial crimes while at the same time protecting and preserving the privacy of customer and institutional financial data. With federated learning, models require new data to update, however, the data is not primary-sourced. In other words, federated learning does not need granular, customer-level (raw) data to be shared across financial institutions to improve its models. Instead, using a federated approach, private financial data can be kept private by using that data to train local models and then sending the updated feature weights of the local model (gradient information) to a centralized aggregator to update a centralized model. This keeps private financial information private while still allowing for that private information to improve the model’s performance. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Sound Credit Union | Identify features in checking accounts that are most attractive to millenials and Gen Z | Our project objective changed from assisting Sound Credit Union in qualifying for CDFI certification to performing a comprehensive analysis of Sound Credit Union’s checking account structure and determine what features were most attractive to Millennial’s and Generation Z. The idea behind this goal was to help sound Credit Union expand its footprint into this demographic. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Sound Credit Union | Development of a branch location and performance model | ||
| Government | CBA Paid Project | AY20-21 | State of WA Courts | Optimization of a funding allocation formula for court interpreter expenses | |
| Wholesale/Retail | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | Stellar Industrial Supply | Analytics to drive sales growth | Create a strategy, plan, develop and deploy a prototype solution to drive superior growth for Stellar’s marketing analytics. Marketing analytics is the practice of measuring, managing and analyzing marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY18-19 | Harbor Wholesale Foods | Reduce the duration of the current pricing process | The purpose of this project is to utilize analytical techniques to reduce the duration of an ETL process that generates dynamic customer pricing. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Stellar Industrial Supply | Identify opportunities to maximize profitability through SKU rationalization and optimization | Stellar Industrial Supply is a privately held, ISO/AS9120-compliant premier industrial supplier. Our client is looking to identify opportunities to maximize profitability by way of SKU rationalization and optimization. As part of the applied project, UW Consulting team will provide the analytics solution/tools that will provide deeper insights into current business opportunities and help with better business decision making to maximize profitability. Given the nature of the data, we will apply numeric techniques such as totaling their assets by looking at their average inventories and totaling transaction on given days and specific items. The main analytic techniques that will or may be applied on these data are Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive and Prescriptive. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Harbor Wholesale Foods | Development of a predictive analysis tool to validate pricing accuracy | Harbor places a high value on precision in all aspects of its operations. Accuracy of pricing for Harbor is critical to maintaining trust with its customers and distinguishing itself from competitors. Our project involved an audit of prices to identify any anomalies that may arise. We used a combination of predictive analysis and anomaly detection methods via unsupervised machine learning to build Harbor dynamic dashboards they can use to extract vital pricing information. Some of the tools we used include R Studio, Azure Cognitive Services, Power BI, and SQL Server Management Studio. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Costco | Tools to understand member shopping patterns in Fresh Foods department | Costco is a northwest company, headquartered in Issaquah, WA, with a footprint that spans across the globe. Costco has retail lines across multiple categories but for the purpose of this project, we will focus on the fresh foods division (produce, meat, bakery). The company is continually making strides to improve their business and is currently interested in gaining insights into the purchasing patterns of their patrons. With this information in hand, they hope to improve overall customer satisfaction, increase sales in the fresh foods department. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Hyundai Capital of America | Increasing sales and customer loyalty | Hyundai Capital of America wants to increase sales and customer loyalty in the Western Region. Project Goal: The purpose of this project is to develop a predictive model that will help Management track, measure, forecast to improve the performance. This model will guide Management to better understand the reasons for current business outcome and what resources can be allocated to achieve the company goals and objectives. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Metropolitan Appliance | Provide data-driven recommendations to maximize e-commerce revenue generation | Metropolitan Appliance, which has earned its name as a dependable local family owned Appliance store in Seattle has limited digital presence in today’s growing online marketplace. The regional independent competitors did not have built out e-commerce sales channels. There is an opportunity to get first-mover advantage among the competitors to increase sales volume and market share. Consultants from UW CBA started with a goal to propose the best cost-effective digital marketing solution through a series of different predictive analysis for Metropolitan Appliance, which will retain and acquire customers. The main objective was to provide data-driven recommendations to increase digital footprint of Metropolitan Appliance to maximize overall revenue. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | Metropolitan Appliance | Development of an omni-channel strategy to attract younger consumers away from big-box and web-only competitors | ||
| Environment | MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium | Tools to improve residents attitudes towards coexistence with urban carnivores in Tacoma | GRIT City Carnivore Project: The application of social media sentiment analysis and key audience targeting best-practices using machine learning for the optimization of conservation programs. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | WA State Dept. of Natural Resources | Methods for retaining and restoring salmon habitat in Snohomish County | Washington’s salmon are in trouble. There is an urgent need to identify methods of maintaining and restoring salmon habitat at the watershed level that can then be replicated across the state. The purpose of this project is to protect habitat essential to the recovery of endangered and threatened salmon in the Snohomish County by identifying parcels at risk for conversion. The intended outcome of this pilot project is to enable DNR to prioritize land preservation program opportunities and effectively assess an entire watershed for potential salmon habitat restoration and protection opportunities. | |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY20-21 | WA State Dept. of Natural Resources | Refinement of land conversion risk model for salmon habitat retention and restoration | ||
| Travel & Hospitality | MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | TCS World Travel | Customer segmentation for new luxury travel offerings | TCS World Travel is a luxury tour operator based in Seattle, WA. Their products can be categorized into Jet Expeditions and Luxury Custom Travel. The goal of the project is to perform descriptive and diagnostic analyses to build business KPIs followed by predictive analysis to segment the client’s customer data based on the interest features. The analysis provided by the MSBA project team will further allow them to gain deeper insights into their customer base. The four phases of the project are Business understanding, Descriptive & diagnostic analysis, Predictive analysis, Cognitive analysis and deployment. The consulting team is introducing TCS with a transformation plan for data collection and data integration to increase their operational efficiency and enable digital transformation. |
| Economic Impact | MSBA Applied Project | AY17-18 | South Sound Military Communities Partnership | Regional Economic Impact of JBLM | Determine the economic impact of the JBLM workforce on the South Sound region and create a process to continue the analysis over periods of time and permit development of annual economic impact reports. |
| MSBA Applied Project | AY19-20 | South Sound Military Communities Partnership | Regional Economic Impact of JBLM | JBLM is the #2 employer in the state and #1 employer in Pierce County. Economics informs and often drives policy. SSMCP believes that local, state and federal policymakers underestimate the economic impact JBLM has in the South Sound and the state of Washington. The lack of detailed economic impact data represents a significant knowledge gap worthy of further study. South Sound Military Communities Partnership (SSMCP) identified two primary goals for the MSBA project team 1) Design, build and deploy an online survey to identify the military connected customer bases of local businesses and the effects of JBLM on the local economy and 2) Expand on the work of the previous Economic impact analysis and incorporate factors such as military retirees, spin-off jobs and cross-region interactions not available during the previous analysis. | |
| CBA Paid Project | AY19-20 | Tacoma Tideflats | Economic impact of the Tacoma Tideflats region on Pierce County | ||
| CBA Paid Project | AY20-21 | US Oil & Refining | Regional economic impact of US Oil & Refining Company |
