1st Place for Northwestern's Capstone Team at IISE's Annual Conference
The IISE Annual Conference & Expo 2025 in Atlanta just wrapped up. Each year, they have a capstone contest:
The IISE Outstanding Capstone Senior Design Project Award recognizes individual students or teams for practical application of ISE knowledge and skills that result (or will result) in significant impact to an organization...
The format is a poster contest with all the semi-finalists (I think 22 this year). The Final Four do presentations the next day. Our team from Northwestern’s IEMS department was awarded 1st Place.
Congratulations to the team of Sahaana Rajesh, Marin Clark, Emilia McDougal, and Juan Olivia.
They worked with Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Their project was called “SwiftShift: A Front-Loaded Staffing Strategy to Improve Turnaround Time for Discharge Rooms.”
They came up with a strategy to reduce the time it took to turnaournd a room (get it cleaned and ready for the next patient) by ~10%. This improves patient care, increases throughput, and increases staff utilization.
To do this, they built a simulation model and analyzed different staffing schedules. The team at Lurie Children’s piloted and then implemented the recommendation.
This project was part of Northwestern’s IEMS capstone class we call Client Project Challenge. I think these projects are a great part of the educational experience, and I’ve been impressed with the quality of deliverables from our teams and support from our clients. If you are interested in doing a project with our students, please let me know.
(IISE is the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering.)