From classrooms to boardrooms, Virginia Tech graduate students embark on a capstone tour

Eleven cities. Fifteen days. Over 5,000 miles.

No, this isn’t the recent leg of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, though you’d be forgiven for the confusion. It’s the Center for Business Analytics summer tour – the culminating event for students in the Master of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in business analytics program.

From June 3-18, students concluded their graduate experience with on-site, in-person capstone presentations to sponsoring companies. The capstone presentation is the pinnacle of nine months of intensive, experiential learning.

For each project, student teams prepare a professional consulting report and formal presentation that summarizes and supports its findings and builds a business case for its recommendations. The capstone projects allow students to work closely with corporate and faculty mentors, experience hands-on learning, and connect the classroom to real-world problems and decision-makers.

Tour schedule

• June 3: Students from the Norfolk Southern team delivered their recommendations to improve serving yard efficiency to representatives from the company in Atlanta. The team developed a framework to gauge serving yard performance across entire divisions to identify areas of improvement or opportunity and leverage them to provide a more robust service product for Norfolk Southern customers.
  
  
• June 4: In Roanoke, a team of students presented its neural network model to Advance Auto Parts. The neural network model is structured to predict future store performance in relation to gross margin.
  
  
• June 5: A student team traveled to Reston, Virginia, to deliver its rubric to NASA Langley Research Center. Students developed a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving generative artificial intelligence outputs to enhance NASA's mission performance and operational efficiency.
  
  
• June 5: Students traveled to X-energy headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and provided recommendations on ways to reduce costly delays and predict material quantities for nuclear power plant construction. The team developed a model to estimate the optimal size for a temporary warehouse to store raw materials during the construction of Xe-100 nuclear reactors.
  
  
• June 6: Students headed to Rocky Mount, Virginia, home of ValleyStar Credit Union to present solutions for increasing credit union member retention and loyalty. The team analyzed current member data and discovered an opportunity to target Generation Z and Generation Alpha with three recommendations to create a comprehensive loyalty program.
  
  
• June 7: At the Acquisition Innovation Research Center in Arlington, students delivered their carefully designed approach to portfolio and project risk assessment. The team established a Stage-Gate Risk Assessment Framework utilizing Portfolio Theory to quantitatively evaluate the risks of the Navy's science and technology acquisition research efforts.
  
  
• June 10: At Carter Machinery headquarters in Salem, students demonstrated how they have enhanced Carter's digital excellence and data quality initiatives. They analyzed current processes and other best practices to identify a way to implement data quality standards companywide, which led to recommendations focused on data entry standards and continuous data monitoring.
  
  
• June 11: After attending several meetings at NobleReach in Tysons, Virginia, students returned to show off their entrepreneur matching tool, which is already in use at the company. The team developed a scalable tagging and matchmaking system to improve the pairing of embedded entrepreneurs in NobleReach's database with suitable government research projects.
  
  
• June 12: A student team went to Inorganic Ventures in Christiansburg to showcase its machine learning model, designed to help chemists formulate compounds. The team evaluated machine learning software to automate workflows to create a competitive advantage in the industry.
  
  
• June 12: Students delivered their predictive analytics tool to customer Flex-Metrics in Roanoke. The team developed a scalable machine learning model to accurately predict catastrophic failure on manufacturing equipment and developed a Power BI dashboard to effectively visualize actionable insights.
  
  
• June 14: The HP team flew to Houston, Texas, to visit the offices of HP and deliver its proposed strategy for HP to achieve its goals of addressing digital equity and gentrification. The HP team analyzed gentrification and digital inequity in Austin, Texas, recommending HP to collaborate with STEM organizations to offer Title I students in-person, interactive summer and afterschool programs to enhance their understanding of technology.
  
  
• June 18: The teams returned to Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus to deliver their respective presentations at the Public Presentation Day, during which the public was able to see each team’s projects and celebrate the cohort members' completion of their master's degrees.