Delta Air Lines

Airlines

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.

#HR Analytics

Harbor Wholesale Foods

Consumer Packaged Goods

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.

#Operations/Optimization

Providence St Joseph Health

Information Technology

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.

#ServiceMarketing

CHI Franciscan

Healthcare

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.

#CapacityManagement

A large healthcare organization in NW

Healthcare

“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.”

#FinancialAnalytics

Communities in Schools of Tacoma

Education

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.

#Service

Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division, Keyport

Government

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.

#Operations/Accounting

TCS World Travel

Travel

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.

#Marketing

Grit City Carnivore Project

Wildlife Conservation

The application of social media sentiment analysis and key audience targeting best-practices using machine learning for the optimization of conservation programs.

#Marketing/Optimization

Costco WholeSale

Retail

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.

#Inventory/Scheduling

IBM

Information Technology

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.

#FinancialAnalytics

Hyundai Capital of America

Retail

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.

#CRM

Stellar Industrial Supply

Supply Chain

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.

#Marketing

Sound Credit Union

Financial/Banking

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.
We teamed together with our client representative and developed a plan that included distributing carefully curated surveys to our MSBA cohort and Sound Credit Union employees. We integrated the feedback responses into a cognitive chat bot model which efficiently predicts and recommends solutions for banking clients based on their personal preferences and choices.

#Marketing

South Sound Military and Communities Partnership

Nonprofit

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.

#EconomicImpact

Tacoma Power

Public Services/Energy

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.

#Service optimization

Metropolitan Appliance

Retail

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.

#E-commerce/marketing

Washington State Department of Natural Resources

Public Services/Wild Life

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.

#Operations

Tacoma Public Schools

Education

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.

#Resource

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 Analytics Innovation (e.g. Data Analytics, Digital Innovation, Operations Research, Management Sciences, Decision Sciences, Data Sciences, Design Sciences, Descriptive, Diagnostic, Predictive, Prescriptive & Cognitive Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence). Analytics Innovation Club gives students the opportunity of volunteering for an applied analytics project and helping organizations to solve their problems by providing data-driven insights.