Tauber students add $820.3 million in value to companies

Ann Arbor, MI –  The 2023 Tauber Team Projects resulted in $820.3 million in savings and revenue improvements, according to sponsoring company calculations, an average of $45.5 million per project over three years. Each summer, teams of Tauber graduate students work for sponsoring companies to uncover savings and champion significant improvements in data analytics, sustainability, supply chain, and strategy – then return to the University of Michigan and present their results to operations leaders at the SPOTLIGHT! Team Project Showcase and Scholarship Competition.

Check out the challenges addressed by four of the eighteen project teams who are presenting at SPOTLIGHT! 2023 – ConAgra, Inc., Mayo Clinic, Modine Manufacturing and Nestle Purina:

ConAgra, Inc. 

The Tauber student team of Rachel Karaban (Master of Business Administration) and Isabel Rolfe (EGL BSE Mechanical Engineering/MSE Industrial and Operations Engineering) aimed to optimize the frozen food supply chain at ConAgra by creating synergies across the brands ConAgra already offers. Additionally, by creating these synergies, the Tauber team analyzed if a hub-and-spoke model is the best solution.

Mayo Clinic

The Tauber student team of Joseph Kearney (Master of Business Administration), Jayanth Tatikonda (EGL BSE Mechanical Engineering/MSE Industrial and Operations Engineering), and Jared Pavlick (EGL BSE Mechanical Engineering/MSE Industrial and Operations Engineering) worked to support the 2030 Bold Forward vision to Cure, Connect and Transform. Mayo Clinic has partnered with the Tauber Institute for Global Operations to develop an action plan and supply chain optimization strategy. To quantifiably benefit the Digital Supply Chain Strategy's Operations Management Platform in the US, the Tauber team conducted a current situation and gap analysis to create an improvement roadmap that focuses on standardizing and optimizing the operation's processes, systems, and personnel.

Modine Manufacturing

The Tauber student team of Abrajeedhan Srilatha (Master of Business Administration) and Griffin Riley (BTS, BBA/Master of Supply Chain Management) helped to create a connected view of global capacity for the Air-Cooled Applications business by developing a standard Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) model that will eventually be integrated into Modine's Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning (SIOP) process.

Nestle Purina

The Tauber student team of Joshua Phan-Gruber (Master of Business Administration) and Hanna Chapin (EGL - BSE Computer Engineering/ MSE Robotics) worked on Purina's existing systems that track and control its inbound supply chain, which were spread across multiple platforms and required greater flexibility to adapt to on-the-ground needs in their factories. The Tauber project focused on consolidating these data feeds into a user-friendly dashboard to improve the company's ability to forecast and adjust its inbound supply chain for a key ingredient.