Greentrike

Childcare
Greentrike is planning to increase the number of childcare centers in Pierce County and was searching for a data-driven solution. The MSBA student consultants developed a tool to analyze and predict specific areas and real estate properties for sustainable growth, marketing solutions, and identifying underserved communities.

#Marketing, #Location, #Fundraising

City of Lynnwood

Recreation, Government

The mission of Lynnwood Parks, Recreation & Cultural Arts (PRCA) Department is to create a healthy community through people, parks, programs, and partnerships. To do this, the PRCA sought to adopt an alternative level-of-service methodology that equitably improves access to quality parks and trails for all residents. Working with this team helped make this goal possible.

By analyzing location-based data, this team of MSBA student consultants identified park utilization, demand, and capacity patterns in Lynnwood. Their focus areas involved analyzing park and trail users, annual/seasonal trends, demographics, and park amenities. They used analytical tools like Tableau, PowerBI, R, SQL Server, SSIS, Azure ML Studio. This type of project is the first of its kind and an exciting proof of concept of how data analysis can fundamentally change how municipal parks departments around the country can better serve their communities.

#Demographic Analysis, #Usage Analysis, #Capacity Planning

City of Tacoma (HR)

Public

Tacoma is a mid-sized urban port city and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. The project will assist the City’s HR department’s ongoing efforts to fulfill strategic plan objectives, and support the City’s Equity and Empowerment Framework. The main goal of this project was to create a usable, well-structured, and predictable visualization tool for the City of Tacoma’s HR Department which would allow them to automate reporting and enhance workforce management. This solution will incorporate Tableau as the visualization tool. The team incorporated additional value-added proof of concept analytic solutions to present the City of Tacoma with future opportunities.

#HR Analytics, #Financial Analytics, #Marketing, #Inventory

Department of Natural Resources

Government

Washington State’s salmon population needs help. Salmon are culturally significant in the Pacific Northwest and are a keystone species. The Washington Department of Natural Resources believes there is an opportunity to restore the salmon population by preserving watersheds on forest land, which is part of the salmons natural habitat. This team has developed an analytics solution to assess the land conversion risk of forest land currently owned by small forest landowners. With this tool, the Department of Natural Resources can allocate resources to those landowners to help mitigate small forest land conversion.

#Risk Management, #Resource Allocation

Sound Credit Union

Financial Retail

This group of students partnered with Sound Credit Union for their Applied Project. Sound operates 28 branches throughout the greater Seattle and Tacoma region and offers over 100 products and financial services to community members. Their work centered around understanding branch operations and what makes a branch successful. As such, their primary objective analyzed profitability to determine which variables have the most impact on successful branch performance through dashboard displays. Their secondary objective was to a create predicative model to understand which variables are most highly correlated to successful branch performance. Their final objective was to create a prescriptive model that could be implemented to improve branch profitability and to predict the profitability of a future branch.

#FinancialAnalytics

Metropolitan Appliance

Retail

Metropolitan Appliance is a locally owned retail supply store that sells and installs kitchen appliances throughout the Puget Sound region. The project goals and accomplishments consist of three sections:

– Improving customer satisfaction of Metropolitan Appliances by constructing a repository data space for the post-showroom consultation data and automating the gathering process for the survey data.

– Improving employee performance on the showroom floor by building an analytics dashboard that measures the customer conversion ratio and employee performance.

– Improving the strategic sales plan for the showroom by building a web-based machine learning product recommendation tool.

#Marketing

City of Tacoma Fire Department

Public Health and Safety

The City of Tacoma Fire Department’s CARES program provides community members with assistance for non-emergency calls. The purpose of this team’s project was to create a prototype predictive model to predict future behavioral health call volumes. Their solution has two parts: a text classification model, and a predictive regression model. The text classification model uses a sample of manually reviewed calls to classify recent TFD 911 calls as behavioral health or not. They used this new variable in the regression model to forecast how many behavioral health calls TFD can expect in the future.

#Call volume forecasting, #Call classification

Schnitzer Steel

Manufacturing / Recycling

Scrap metal recycling is an important and imperative part of reusing and recycling efforts, especially those that involve processing metal recovered from end-of-life products. Schnitzer Steel Industries is a large metal recycling company that manages several facilities across the United States. The goal of this project is to use data analytics to effectively optimize their operations and manage the recycling mill’s shredder performance.

#Operations/Optimization

South Tacoma Auto

Automotive, Retail

South Tacoma Auto is a mid-sized independent, pre-owned vehicle dealership company. The business opportunity within South Tacoma Auto is employee retention. Using tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Azure ML, SQL, and many others this team has been able to provide detailed analysis and recommendations to South Tacoma Auto with the goal of maximizing future employee retention.

#HR Analytics

UW Tacoma

Education

The University of Washington Tacoma (UWT) was founded in 1990 and is a sister-branch to the larger UW campus located in Seattle. Since their establishment in 1990, the UWT has been growing exponentially. The purpose of this project is to understand the current UWT audience and to make recommendations on how to improve student recruitment and retention.

#Predictive Analytics, #Prescriptive Analytics, #Descriptive Analytics, #Cognitive Analytics, #Higher Education Analytics

Communities in Schools of Tacoma

Non-Profit, Education

The ideal-state vision for Communities In Schools of Tacoma (CIST) is to offer community resources inside of public schools, where they are accessible, coordinated, and accountable.

Together, CIST and the Applied Project Team explored the opportunities within CIST’s constituent data to further its efforts to uphold this ideal state vision, by focusing on increasing individual donor funding. The opportunity is to create an interactive dashboard that visualizes donor information to gain insights about individual donor behavior to then be leveraged within future funding campaigns.

Over the course of the year, the team developed a solution by using the agile methodology, creating a robust data architecture, and revealing exciting insights about CISTs donor landscape that will strategically inform the future of their fundraising.

#Research & Development

City of Puyallup

Government

In response to COVID-19 and the resulting recession, the City of Puyallup reached out to UWT CBA’s MSBA program to gain a better understanding of their sales tax revenue in order to find ways to increase their economic resilience to recessions. The team performed descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to help the City gain deeper insights into their data. The descriptive and diagnostic analytics performed include the creation of a sales tax revenue dashboard and several demographics dashboards in Power BI. Predictive and prescriptive analytics include a sales tax revenue prediction model and a Q&A chatbot.

#Finance, #Budgeting, #Marketing

Virginia Mason Franciscan Health (CHI Franciscan)

Healthcare

CHI Franciscan has been improving their processes and providing the best patient experience possible for many years. The goal of this project is to identify and analyze barriers that may impact patient stays at hospital, and to improve health services and patient experience.

#Optimization

Korean Women’s Association

Non-Profit

Together with the Korean Women’s Association, this project team has worked over the past year on a blend of business intelligence through analytics and business process improvement. The project has focused on the training requirements of the more than 1,200 caregivers who provide vital services to thousands in need throughout Washington State. Through the analytical power of various tools such as PowerBI and Tableau, coupled with the skills taught throughout this program, we have developed multiple tools to empower the KWA to be better than ever.

#Operations/Optimization

Analytics Innovation Club

The University of Washington Analytics Innovation Club is the University of Washington Student Chapter of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The club encourages interest in the field of Data & Analytics.

This year the club organized Healthcare Analytics Career Pathway and GitHub workshops, Program and Product Management Panel, and initiated two industry partnership projects.

Last year, AI Club won 2020 INFORMS Student Chapter Annual Award. Read more…