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More than 200 teams representing 12 schools and four colleges took over Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion on Tuesday for the bi-annual Capstone Design Expo, marking the largest in-person edition of the event since Fall 2019. The H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial Systems and Engineering (ISyE) was represented by 28, with projects ranging from order fulfillment for Penguin Random House publishing to line efficiency at concessions stands in the Atlanta Braves Truist Park.

The top team for ISyE, however, was a group of seven seniors working with Tiffany and Co., one of America’s largest luxury jewelry retailers under holding company Louis Vuitton, on a project intended to improve fulfillment goals for both domestic and international orders. Upon examination, the team, cheekily named “Put a Ring on It” after the hit Beyoncé song, identified a cause for delays in the value-added services station of their warehouse where orders go through necessary alterations such as laser engraving and price-tagging.

For the project, the team proposed a proposed two solutions: re-slotting items in the warehouse and wave planning.

“We created an optimization model with 1.6 million decision variables and 1.7 million constraints, and a heuristic model to allow the client to dynamically find the most optimal location for each item,” said Shreya Desai, a senior Industrial Engineering student on the team. “After re-slotting items based on their frequencies of getting picked, we created an application for the client to run these models themselves once a year.

“Alongside re-slotting in the picking zones of the warehouse, we recommended additional criteria for the waves of items moving through the warehouse at a time such as grouping by shipping carriers and adding a capacity on the number of items that need to go through value-added services.”

Each of these conditions were consolidated into a simulation that mimicked the current warehouse setup, and the team found that models would reduce the cycle time by 21 percent, with an average reduction in the queue at value-added services at 1.5 hours.

“This senior design project truly allowed us to amalgamate what we have learned for the past four years as industrial engineers at Georgia Tech,” Desai said. “Even with the ups and downs of the project, having a great team and supportive advisor allowed us to push through and provide our client with results that we are very proud of.”

Gunter Sharp, an ISyE professor emeritus, was the advisor for the team’s project. The project was titled Diamonds & Distribution: Improving the Order Fulfillment Process.

In addition to Desai, the full team included Asli Yucebilgin, Fares Hasan, Neha Srivatsa, Ozashwee Ghimire, Saman Muhammad, and William Reich. For their school win, the team was awarded $1000.

The overall winner for the expo was Tired Techies, a team comprised of computer, electrical, and mechanical engineers who created a sleep-monitoring mask and smart alarm that reduces drowsiness by waking the sleeper during the correct stage of the sleep cycle. That team was one of three that focused on getting a good night’s rest, perhaps a sign of the high-achieve college students’ daily struggle.

To learn more about the expo – including how to attend, judge, or suggest a project for future editions – head over to expo.gatech.edu.