Even though our students leave their internships to return to school at the end of the summer, their real world experience continues.
The second year of the Enterprise Consulting program is set up to mimic a business environment. Students, paired with MIS undergraduate teams, serve as project managers on value-driven projects with partner companies. These projects are high priority and high profile for our program's partners. In many cases, the projects are extensions of projects worked on by our students during the summer. Below you will find a video describing a project in which our students worked to revitalize the economic opportunity to talented artists in the BlackBelt region of Alabama.
Learn more about our efforts in economic revitalization.
Each Enterprise Consulting student is paired with an MIS undergraduate team and serves as the team's project manager. The team completes a high priority systems development project for a client company. Often, this project will be an extension of a project undertaken during the student's managed summer internship.
Through these projects, students are able to gain experience by:
- Acting as liaisons between the client and the MIS program.
- Deepening their technical development skills.
- Developing critical project management skills
- Project planning
- Resource planning and allocation
- Mentoring
- Personal and team evaluation
- Prioritization of requirements
At the end of each project, teams present their results to their project stakeholders and to their peers. Oftentimes this involves traveling to the client's base of operations and presenting in front of high level executives. This experience gives our students the opportunity to truly see how their work will be evaluated once they enter the business world.
Read about some of the exciting projects our students have experienced:
- The Challenge of Going Mobile
- Time Matters
- The Kindred Store Goes Online
- Deluged with Data
- Community Web Development
- Economic Revitalization
- SMS Wireless Marketing
- P&G Imina Website
- Data at your Fingertips
- Moving at the speed of data
- Leadership makes the difference
- Palm Survey Application
- ALDOT
The Challenge of Going Mobile
Imagine receiving product updates, advice, and coupons through your portable handheld device while you browse the grocery store shelves.
The goal of our project was to help a Fortune 100 company achieve this vision. We conceptualized, developed, and market tested portable marketing applications.
The brainstorming stage of the project pushed the team's creativity to the extreme as we looked for ways to connect business opportunities to emerging technologies. We then were able to translate the concept into reality by developing a concept prototype that was presented to consumers with tremendous positive response. Next, we used a 'best practices' methodology to implement the second evolution of the prototype, designed to streamline data transfer and maximize usability. This was again market tested with positive feedback.
Time Matters
We were charged with creating a time and attendance system to be used in 14 plants distributed across USA, Canada and Mexico. We were responsible for all phases of the systems development process, from initiation through to implementation.
We watched employees clock out to see how fast our system had to scan an ID card (VERY fast!), we studied labor union contracts to make sure we were meeting all agreements, and we structured the system to maximize code reuse and portability among plants. This project was critical to thousands of employees. Any error on our part could have a significant impact on their wallets! A card swipe lost because of a network failure could cost a day's pay. Errors were not tolerated. This challenging, complex development project tested and strengthened project management, client negotiation, analytical and technical skills.
The Kindred Store Goes Online
How do you mirror your successful brick-and-mortar business on the Internet with added values? Our project was to implement an answer to this question by enhancing their ability to serve their customers in a web-enabled way.
The project team created an online store, where merchandise is sold and various types of information are offered. Our project was the starting point for the company's transformation to the world of Internet.
Standing on solid understanding of the business, we were able to add validity to the solution we delivered. And of course, our solution had to fit in the context of ongoing business in an ever-changing economic environment.
With relationship developed over the period of project, we have acquired sincere desire to constantly seek how business processes can be improved with technology. We were more than pleased to see our client thrilled to make a substantial progress with the site at the end.
Deluged With Data
In this project, we were charged with aiding a major state agency structure and analyze data to provide greater value and insights into their market. This agency is a leading provider of value-added population, business, and economic data. Our goal was to allow agency personnel (and ultimately agency customers) greater flexibility and access to the vast amounts of historical data and projections at their disposal.
To meet this goal, we developed a data mart using Microsoft SQL Server. This data mart has tremendously improved agency operations. It has allowed all authorized personnel ready access to critical data. It has simplified and enriched the ability to conduct comparative analysis (how has income changed over time, between counties, or between industries?), critical to state and business investment decisions. It has freed agency personnel from large amounts of manual data entry and gathering, allowing them to perform more value-added services to their clients.
This project strengthened our teams' business process and technical skills, and we better appreciate the power and limitations of today's database and data warehousing tools.
Community Web Development
The goal of the project is to help counties promote their economic development, which may include promoting local businesses as well as demonstrating opportunities for business investment in the county.
Our team is providing support and direction in establishing web presence to promote economic development for four individual west Alabama counties as a pilot program. We provide each of the counties with a template for an economic development web site, the training necessary to build, maintain, and promote a fully functional site based on the template, as well as self-directed training materials for office software and web development tools.
Being able to create a template for a web site from the ground up has given the students the opportunities to see all that is involved and necessary to make a website successful. We have the power to make a positive impact on areas that desperately need a jump-start to their local economy. This is the first step in helping to increase real jobs being created and capital being spent in the community.
Economic Revitalization
BlackBeltTreasures.com - The site for arts and crafts made here at home by Alabama artisans.
The burgeoning virtual global marketplace is a boon to those artisans with access to the web and to the knowledge and skills needed to harness its power. Unfortunately, the digital divide excludes many from this rich channel.
The vision of BlackBeltTreasures.com is to serve these talented untapped artists by serving as their channel to world markets, and serve the state of Alabama through economic expansion and increased rural employment.
Our team was charged with:
- Designing the core business processes supporting BlackBeltTreasures.com, including product sales, inventory management, artist relationship management, shipping, and customer relationship management.
- Determining the web site features necessary to ensure the success of this business venture, such as ease of product search, simplicity of purchase, and speed of transmission.
- Designing the Black Belt Treasures storefront to make buying Alabama arts and crafts a pleasure to the customer.
SMS Wireless Marketing
With new technology, come new capabilities and many more challenges. The UA-MIS team assigned to this project is in the process of finding out what it takes to effectively market products via cell phone through SMS (Short Messaging Service) in the United States.
How do you launch a national program over multiple cellular service providers who do not operate with the same technology? How do you make simple text interesting enough to compel the consumer to buy more stuff? These are the kind of questions that the team is faced with everyday. And, in the end, we will provide our customer with a creative business concept that will work seamlessly with our technical solution to give them the knowledge they need to continue to maintain their competitive advantage through greater understanding of consumers in the consumer products industry.
Procter & Gamble Imina Website Development & Content Maintenance
There is very little information on how to effectively use the web to reach a specific target demographic market in order to drive product sales. Our goal is to conduct extensive market research into the web-related habits of African American women and then to translate those findings into a brand website. To do this effectively, our team has been charged with three primary objectives:
- Determine the most effective ways to use the Internet in order to drive sales to a specific target group.
- Construct a brand website.
- Reduce cost of routine maintenance by developing a web-based content maintenance solution.
Also, due to the limited scope of the new brand and the current economic conditions, it is especially important to make effective use of the resources available. One area that traditionally has had extremely high costs is that of routine website maintenance. Our goal is to reduce maintenance costs by shifting the ownership of routine updates away from the 3rd party developers and give that responsibility to in-house, non-technical corporate personnel. We will accomplish this through the construction of a database-driven content maintenance tool that uses simple forms to update content on the website.
Data at your Fingertips
CBER (Center for Business and Economic Research) stores information on a variety of topics, such as demographics, income, and employment for all states in the U.S. Through the development of a data warehouse and online subscription services, CBER aims to become the one-stop-shop for all data needs, as well as the producer of value-added products to meet all customer requirements.
To accomplish this initiative, four individual projects have been undertaken:
- develop a prototype that would represent the data from a single data mart on the Web.
- create a data mart containing retail trade data received monthly from the Alabama Department of Revenue. The data reports retail sales by month for each county in Alabama for different categories such (e.g. food sales, lumber sales, etc.).
- develop a self-sustaining business model for CBER. In the initial brainstorming session, the team developed a plan to explore innovative opportunities to match business opportunities with CBER's present capabilities.
- evaluate various hardware and software platforms available to help CBER process transactions in a more efficient manner
Moving at the Speed of Data
Speeding up the delivery process of customer orders to a third-party warehouse means orders are shipped faster and money is collected sooner. It is imperative that communication errors are reduced and inventory data is quickly updated. The goal is to:
- redesign the business process
- construct a new system to allow for faster communication with third party warehouses
- reduce information errors.
To accomplish this, the UA-MIS team is developing a prototype that will be implemented at the client's site using E-commerce to communicate vital information and update the client's inventory at nine third-party warehouse distributors across the country.
Leadership Makes the Difference
This project was critical in meshing people, leadership, and project tracking. The project incorporated all aspects into a project-tracking intranet based application that management would be able to depend on. The project team tackled the challenge of incorporating strategic, tactical, and leadership projects into one application. The core idea was to incorporate and measurably track the leadership development of people. A feedback capturing mechanism was thus designed to capture sensitive and personal growth information on a project-by-project basis over time.
Palm Survey Application
A UA-MIS team was assigned the task of developing a Palm application to capture feedback from customers who did not make a purchase as they left the store. The innovative application will allow customer to give a quick response to the questions, allow managers to collect survey data, and give Regional VPs and District Managers the ability to change the survey questions for future strategies. By providing management with a means to gauge customer perception, the application will help to enhance the shopping experience by improving inventory management, floor merchandising, store safety, and associate productivity. All of these enhancements will drive the ultimate goal of increasing store sales.
ALDOT
Today's transportation environment is characterized by high user demand, budgets stretched by significant and growing requirements, past and projected declines in staff resources, and a mature system that is experiencing ongoing deterioration. We have been charged with helping the Alabama Department of Transportation find methods to assess the trade-offs between alternative improvements and investment strategies and communicate those trade-offs to their constituents.