Capstone Projects
Capstone projects are sponsored by local industries and provide UT Dallas students an opportunity to apply the skills and knowledge gained to solve real-world, challenging problems in the area of supply chain management. Interaction, feedback and guidance from an industry mentor are a key to this course. All general supply chain courses should be completed before taking this course.
Key Benefits
Benefits to students include:
- Provides opportunities to apply skills and knowledge gained to real-world problems
- Provides opportunities to interact with industry leaders and leading academics
- Offers students industry specific knowledge
- Teaches students to self-learn and learn from group discussions
Benefits to industries include:
- Provides in-house consultants to solve problems
- Offers industry leaders multiple views and perspectives on their current problems
- Keeps industry leaders current with the latest developments and enables them to plan internal education efforts
- Provides an opportunity to evaluate and appreciate the relevance of theory to practice
- Provides an opportunity to evaluate and hire the best candidates
- Offers low cost, low risk and high ROI
Approach
- Identifies target companies and industry mentor to participate in the course.
- Defines project with industry mentor.
- Identifies interdisciplinary teams based on the skills required for the project.
- Industry mentor presents the project to the team.
- Each team completes a "statement of work" and gets approval from instructor.
- Each team works on a specific project and applies the concepts learned with guidance from the instructor.
- The instructor presents specific topics during the course.
- The team presents a report on the progress to the industry leader and instructor based on an agreed upon schedule for feedback.
- A final report and a team presentation are delivered to the sponsoring industry at the end of the course.
- Final grades are awarded by the instructor in consultation with the industry mentor.
- The sponsoring company hosts a dinner party for the team.
Fees and Requirements
- Companies donate $2,500 (start-ups) or $5,000 (established) to the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks for each sponsored project.
- The industry mentor works with the instructor to define the project, provide time to the project team as required and helps manage the scope for timely completion.
