Bringing Work to School
This certificate program seeks to link corporate and academic communities by providing a high quality applied program of study valued by its participants and their organizations.

Culminating in the three-credit internship, students apply the knowledge, skills, and abilities learned in the program’s courses directly within their organizations to resolve real-time problems and derive measurable results.  Examples of business applications in the workplace utilizing the techniques and software included in this program follow: 

Manufacturing

• Eastman Kodak Company, the world’s largest manufacturer of photographic products, estimated decision analysis contributions in excess of one billion dollars from 178 projects undertaken at the company between 1990 and 1999 (Clemen & Kwit, 2001).  
• Tompkins Rubber Company achieved ISO 9000 certification in its first registrar audit within 18 months through the implementation of a “general decision-making framework based on AHP for making and documenting quality-related decisions” (Partovi, Withers, & Bradford, 2002).

Healthcare and Pharmaceutical

• Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest of its kind in the U.S., improved its contract negotiations with insurers using Bayesian forecasting and nonlinear optimization models for revenue improvements of up to $17 million annually (Born, Carbajal, Smith, Wallace, Abbott, Adyanthaya, Boyd, Keller, Liu, New, Rieger, Winemiller, & Woestmeyer, 2004).
• Management at a mid-sized hospital used Pareto analysis, one of the seven quality tools, and linear regression analysis to reduce the error rate in medication administration records; the resultant Six Sigma effort had among its benefits a “decrease in the total error rate from 0.33% to 0.14% in five months” and “estimated labor cost reductions of $550,000 (annualized at $1.32 million)” (Esimai, p. 57, 2005).
   

Banking and Finance

• Alongside consultant group Market Advantages, First Union Corp. used software from SPSS to perform data analysis from a survey of more than 3,600 customers, in conjunction with simulation techniques, to identify new customer segments, match customer needs with more cost-effective delivery channels, and redesign product and service delivery channels (Market Advantage, 2001).
• Bank One Card Services, Inc., the largest issuer of Visa cards in the US, developed a portfolio control and optimization model by using a Markov decision process based on time-series data from an 18 month random sample of customer accounts. In integrating Monte Carlo simulation and process flowcharts, the model after refinements “increases NPV by about $3 per account and (Bank One) expects its impact to exceed $75 million per year” (Trench, Pederson, Lau, Ma, Wang, & Nair, p. 20, 2003).

Transportation and Warehousing

• Continental Airlines, a top 5 US airline based on volume, developed an assignment model using mixed-integer and linear programming to optimize pilot planning and training resulting in estimated savings in excess of $10 million per year (Yu, Pachon, Thengvall, Chandler, & Wilson, 2004).
• Nu-kote International, the “largest independent manufacturer and distributor of aftermarket imaging supplies for home and office printing devices,” saved $425 million and estimates annual savings of over $1 million due to linear programming that modeled their supply chain with different warehouse configurations.  Using the Solver platform within Microsoft Excel, the models provided a new way of thinking that not only saves money, but provides a higher level of customer service through decreased shipping times (LeBlanc, Hill, Greenwell, & Czesnat, p. 139, 2004).  

Information Systems/Information Technology

• AT&T used linear programming with a network model formulation in developing an optimization tool for restoring capacity at its network, producing “economic benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars through the strategic allocation of critical network resources” (Ambs, Cwilich, Deng, Houck, Lynch, & Yan, p. 41, 2000).
• Maxager, a leading B2B software provider for selling capacity profitably, chose simulation techniques using aggregate customer data versus long-term pilot studies to illustrate the benefits of its product. As a result, the “simulation-driven approach has cut costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars" while reducing sales cycles by half from 12 months to 6 months (Gavirneni, Morrice, & Mullarkey, p. 94, 2004).

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