In today’s increasingly complex business environment, many companies are turning to higher education to help deliver innovative solutions to their biggest challenges. At Purdue’s Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, these relationships are driven by student teams working with the school’s Business Partnerships Office and its applied research centers.
Matt Lawrence, Managing Director, Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning
The partnerships office streamlines opportunities for industry and alumni to connect with students and faculty beyond the traditional classroom setting. Faculty, staff and students create unique opportunities for business problems to be addressed through consulting-focused experiential learning projects, course-based engagements, or contracts with center partners.
“What's been most important is building a strong match between what students are looking for, what their academic and professional goals are, and allowing them to transfer that into the working world through academic projects,” says Managing Director Jess Franta. “It all begins with an initial conversation of the business challenge that we're hoping to solve and how Purdue and the business school can make that happen.”
One source of partnerships is the Krenicki Center for Business Analytics and Machine Learning. Collaborating with faculty, students and corporate partners, the center works with the partnerships office to enhance research and dissemination of state-of-the-art information technologies and analytical techniques to deliver actionable insights into business decision making.
“The Krenicki Center was created in part to give students more opportunities to engage in experiential learning activities and to deliver innovative solutions to the companies that engage with the business school,” says Managing Director Matt Lawrence. “We act as a conduit and broker for creating those relationships, teaming faculty and students to utilize business data analytics to solve deep specialized problems.”
The Dauch Center for the Management of Manufacturing Enterprises (DCMME) and the Global Supply Chain Management Initiative (GSCMI), which often collaborate on industry projects, are two of the school’s most active applied research centers and also work with the partnerships office.
“Our shared mission is to help businesses succeed by providing them with innovative and effective solutions,” says Managing Director Steve Dunlop. “This semester alone, we’ll have 60-plus students working on about 30 to 35 projects. They’ll develop a statement of work, chart the project stages, do the research, and meet with the clients on a weekly or biweekly basis. And they have firm deliverables, so it's a true project management scenario with a final report that they give at the end of the timeframe.”
Real Projects, Real Solutions
Lawrence says no two projects or relationships are alike. “It's like starting over from scratch every time. You may not know where a project is going to go, but the belief and faith is that you're going to generate a valuable opportunity to lead something impactful from a research perspective, and that students will have significant opportunities to learn and grow.”
The projects deliver real solutions to companies and real-word experience to students. “We make sure both parties are invested in the process and the solution, which gives the project value and structure,” Lawrence says. “Our relationships with corporate partners also give them access to potential interns and student hires. And that needs to be maintained — it's not just a handoff between the university and the companies. It needs to be a seamless path.”
It’s particularly impactful for company partners to see the capabilities of business students, Franta says. “They're often exceeding clients’ expectations of what they thought was possible from a team of students. They can focus on problem solving, offer new and innovative ways of thinking, and dive deeper into a solution. It’s a benefit to the company to mentor and develop these teams.”
“What's most important is building a strong match between what students are looking for [and] what their academic and professional goals are, and allowing them to transfer that into the working world through academic projects.”
Jess Franta, Managing Director, Business Partnerships Office
Another benefit is fostering a strong, cohesive team that allows students to apply both their technical and soft skills in a real situation that matters not only to themselves, but also the company partner that they're working with.
“We give students exposure to the professional world and exposure to a company that they may want to join after graduation, so it's exploration as well as application,” Franta says. “For example, we did a project with Whirlpool where each week someone from their rotational program visited with student teams to help them develop an innovative product for the company. The students got exposed to a wide variety of functions at Whirlpool, and the recruiting manager got see the final outcome of their work.”
Prasad Raghu, a recent graduate of the school’s master’s in Global Supply Chain Management (MSGSCM) program, took advantage of several GSCMI and DCMEE partner projects during his time at Purdue, including the opportunity to work as a graduate researcher on a supply chain project.
“Our team worked with a corporate partner in manufacturing to analyze their delivery data, reduce delays, and increase their overall efficiency,” he says. “I was able to draw upon my past experience of being in business strategy and operations to help them understand what to look for within the data.”
Raghu was also a graduate research assistant for DCMME, where he analyzed the economic effects of active transportation for the Indiana Department of Transportation. “Active transportation is when individuals power themselves, such as riding a bike or running,” he says. “We looked at how it is improving people’s health and impacting the state’s revenue.”
Another highlight from Raghu’s time at Purdue was participating in the Exploring Business in Peru program, a two-credit management class hosted by GSCMI and transportation, logistics, and storage company Tlogistica of Lima, Peru. The program provides undergraduate and master’s students with the occasion to work on real-life business problems and provide solutions to businesses in Peru. The projects are implemented by the companies involved and are related to the subjects of supply chain, manufacturing and operations.
“This was an experience that I knew I wanted to be a part of as soon as I heard it was happening,” Raghu says. “It's not every day that a graduate student gets those kinds of opportunities.”
Other partnerships have involved students from the Master’s in Business Analytics and Information Management (MSBAIM) program, says Matthew Lanham, academic director of the program and a clinical assistant professor in quantitative methods at the Daniels School.
“Industry partners can help academic programs stay focused on key knowledge, skills and abilities graduates need to be successful,” Lanham says. “These projects allow partners to evaluate the students in a low-stakes, internship-like environment that is mutually beneficial to both. If a student doesn’t have the right fit, they still have a great experience to showcase to other employers, and the partner gets some value from the work performed.”
Students, particularly those in the MSBAIM program, also share their project work with the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, known as INFORMS. Since the 2017 INFORMS Business Analytics Conference, nearly 250 students have presented 80 posters showcasing work they have done with companies.
The Daniels School was recently recognized for its efforts with the prestigious INFORMS 2023 UPS George D. Smith Prize, which is open to programs from all academic disciplines and recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of operations research and analytics.
“Getting analytics and data science students involved in experiential learning projects with companies and participating in case competitions or hackathons are key,” Lanham says. “The primary reasoning is to ensure our students practice their skills outside the classroom curriculum and add another experience they can potentially showcase to employers.”
In addition to putting their skills to work on real-worlds projects, students benefit from an expansive pipeline of talent. “We've had students who have been hired for full-time jobs or completed internships with our corporate partners,” Dunlop says. “It adds value during the interview process when students can talk about their experience and demonstrate the hands-on aspect of what they've done.”
Student-Driven Learning
A constant in the Daniels School’s focus on corporate engagement is the role of students. For one of its current projects, for example, the Business Partnerships Office is building a cross-functional team that will work with a medical device startup, including a number of students who are focused on negotiation, consulting, and strategy. Another project engages students in the school’s Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) program to support automated video surveillance and identify actions that may lead to injury or safety issues.
“They're working with that company to build a specific sensor system that would alert management of potential red flags,” Franta says. “We're also moving into the marketing space this semester, so students will be working with a customer satisfaction survey post-purchase, and identifying how the company can improve overall customer experience with their products.”
At the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, corporate partnerships and research includes students at both the undergraduate and graduate level.
Though the Griswold Undergraduate Research Internships program, for example, selected students from the Honors College or Larsen Leaders Academy work on paid internship projects for corporate clients through DCMME and GSCMI. In recent years, these projects have included value-stream mapping for a packaging company, site selection for a local manufacturer, and an inventory management app for a company that crafts custom-made horseback riding and uniform footwear.
In addition to the projects, Griswold Interns participate in seminars learning about intellectual property, project management and other relevant subjects.
“The Griswold Internship has been an excellent opportunity to work on real-world projects and develop data analysis, communication, and leadership skills,” says Hannah George, a junior majoring in English and marketing. “I’ve worked with a Fortune 500 company to develop dashboards that connect to their live data warehouse. This required me to learn how to use the Power BI platform, a skill that I’ve since been able to build upon for future projects and add to my resume.”
George says weekly client meetings ensured that the tasks were accomplished to the client’s standards and gave her the opportunity to practice communicating key information to stakeholders in real time. After the initial project, which was to build a dashboard to help visualize warehouse withdrawals, the client has continued to work with the Griswold program.
Gary Griswold (MSIA ’68) and his wife, Mickie, who fund the program, understand the transformative effect of applying knowledge outside the classroom. “It’s often difficult for young students to know exactly what they want to do in their careers,” Gary says. “Hands-on experiences, such as these internships, can serve as a navigational tool to point them in the right direction.”
Among the Krenicki Center’s biggest partners is the global consulting company Accenture. “They were looking for very high-level strategic and innovative solutions, so we began by pairing them with faculty members doing research related to their needs,” Lawrence says. “That led to a number of student-led projects with the company as well as its clients.” Other corporate partners have included Cisco, Walmart, Eli Lilly, Nielsen, and IBM.
For example, a Fortune 500 consumer products company needed to develop prediction models to forecast sales of thousands of products sold under various brand names, and each product had hundreds of features. “Creating and maintaining individual models for each product required significant work and constant maintenance,” he says. As a solution, the Krenicki Center developed a robust clustering of interpretable prediction models, including values for rank-ordering the critical features.
In another corporate partnership, a large industrial manufacturing company needed to expand its analytics and engineering capacity for R&D to develop a semi-autonomous robot. The Krenicki Center’s solution was to form an interdisciplinary team with data analytics, machine learning, and electrical and mechanical engineering expertise to design a robot with sensors to collect and interpret perception-capture data.
Undergraduate students in the school’s Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) program also work with DCMME and GSCMI industry partners as part of their Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) coursework and the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. “Our projects span from determining the best floor design for a facility to using cameras to trigger safety violations in warehouses,” Dunlop says.
Dunlop also highlights the ongoing work DCMEE and GSCMI is doing for the state’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Product Commission. “We’re having students examine the challenges faced by small and medium-sized manufacturers caused by the transition from internal combustion engines to battery-powered EVs,” he says. “Among other solutions, they’ve developed strategies to mitigate the risk of decreasing sales, as well as having local companies supply buyers with products that are currently being imported.”
Going forward, Franta says the Daniels School will continue evolving its partnerships with the needs of both industry and students. “What's great about where we're sitting now is that there's such a strong emphasis on holistic partnerships, so we’re getting creative with how companies can engage with Purdue,” she says. “If a company has a specific need, we can meet it.”
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