Graduate students deliver data-driven solutions for industry partners
The capstone experience culminated in presentations to sponsors and a showcase of student innovation.
Each year, students in the Master of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in business analytics program at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business demonstrate the power of applied analytics through real-world capstone projects.
Over the rigorous nine-month capstone process, students tackled complex challenges for industry, leading sponsors across sectors including heavy equipment, manufacturing, finance, consulting, and cybersecurity. Using skills learned in the program, including data engineering, clustering, market basket analysis, predictive modeling, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation, and more, students created real, tangible business impact.
"Our students consistently deliver solutions that help industry partners solve real problems," said Jay Winkeler, executive director of the program. "Through the capstone process, students can immediately apply skills learned in the classroom towards solving real-world challenges."
Between June 9-20, each capstone team traveled to meet with company executives and deliver its findings and recommendations in-person. In total, students traversed 4,263 miles to reach the 11 corporate sponsors.
The program culminated on Public Presentation Day, held in Whittemore Hall on June 25, where each team delivered a presentation summarizing its findings, solutions, and recommendations to its sponsor.
Meet the student teams and learn how their work is making an impact across industries.
Identifying decision makers for smarter sales
- Industry sponsor: Carter Machinery
- Capstone team members: Lance Dalton, Seamus Denevan, Jenna Feldman, Hannah Finnell, and Julia Fixsen
Students from the Carter Machinery team developed an automated customer contact cleaning system and applied fuzzy matching in Python to transform 489,000 purchase orders into 21,000 unique decision-makers, achieving 96 percent name match accuracy and 93 percent purchase attribution accuracy. They then built interactive Tableau dashboards to help Carter’s sales team quickly identify high-value contacts based on their purchasing activity.
Transforming factory performance with actionable visuals
- Industry sponsor: Flex-Metrics
- Capstone team members: Hunter McElroy, Max Kennedy, Esra Ezici, and Shivani Kumar
The team expanded Flex-Metrics’ product portfolio by designing new job-based visuals and drill-downs within an interactive reporting tool. The new report allows managers to slice data by equipment, job description, and key metrics, helping them prioritize high-impact improvements. With this tool, FlexMetrics’ customers gain a clearer window into their operations and can tackle inefficiencies with data-backed confidence.
Expanding revenue models for technology services
- Industry sponsor: HP
- Capstone team members: Turner Bass, Daniel Kalegha, Bea Heratsch, Eddie Ozycz, and Sean Raines
The HP capstone team expanded the total addressable market approach to include lifecycle services within the enterprise sector, HP’s largest and most data-rich segment. Integrating the expansion increased HP’s total addressable market estimate by nearly 4 percent within the tested enterprise lifecycle services branch. This gives HP’s decision-makers visibility into how services influence revenue potential alongside hardware sales and supporting long-term growth.
Unlocking customer insights to drive sales growth
- Industry sponsor: Inorganic Ventures
- Capstone team members: Jack Gotta, Rachel Unruh, Chris Harrison, and Yu Xie
The team utilized K-Means clustering, market basket analysis, and an AI industry-mapping approach to help Inorganic Ventures reach its goal of increasing annual sales by at least 10 percent over five years. The team mapped each customer to its industry and developed a custom Python script for market basket analysis — saving the company over $8,000 annually in software fees. The team’s analysis indicates that, with the benefit of their work, Inorganic Ventures can expect an increase of 28 percent, with a new expected growth rate of 11.4 percent.
Strengthening cybersecurity talent recruitment and retention
- Industry sponsor: Leidos
- Capstone team members: Will Coker, Anthony Brozey, Alberto Calderon, Alexa Karmis, and Sarah Chevraux
Students utilized a five-phase approach to develop strategies for Leidos to effectively recruit and retain cleared cybersecurity professionals. They examined the most effective sourcing pipelines, from demographic hotspots and military markets to open-source communities and job platforms, and benchmarked Leidos against key competitors to highlight differentiators. The recommendations equip Leidos to expand its cleared cyber talent pipeline with smarter sourcing, stronger branding, and new development pathways.
Optimizing long-term risk mitigation for smarter project selection
- Industry sponsor: NASA
- Capstone team members: Claire Lympus, Jaden Dixon, Jeff Stepien, and Chris Nelson
NASA’s current project selection framework focuses heavily on short-term risk and can overlook significant long-term costs and risks of delaying maintenance or infrastructure upgrades. Students developed a new long-term 5x5 risk scoring matrix that runs in parallel with NASA’s existing system. This new framework helps portfolio managers assess long-term risks, supports smarter budget allocation, and is intended to extend the life of critical infrastructure.
AI-powered tools to scale challenge sourcing and mentor matching
- Industry sponsor: NobleReach Foundation
- Capstone team members: Hudson Aikins, Emily Saintsing, Aaron Gamarra, and Nada Fitian
The team developed two AI-powered tools to help NobleReach expand and scale its Innovation for Impact program, which gives enrolled undergraduates real-world, high-impact problems to tackle. The first tool automates challenge statement creation — identifying the problem for students to solve — and the second helps match those challenges with mentors, through a series of data mining and validation steps. These tools dramatically reduce the time needed to curate challenges and identify mentors.
Enhancing the undergraduate student experience through data analysis
- Industry sponsor: Pamplin College of Business
- Capstone team members: Sydney Fromm, Jamie Fonseca, Zarah King, and Sally Steppling
To aid the Pamplin College of Business’ strategic planning process, students benchmarked against top schools and designed a custom student survey that gathered more than 300 responses. From this data, they built an interactive Power BI dashboard tracking eight student-centered key performance indicators. With these tools, Pamplin can now track progress on student experience goals with concrete data, and connect improvements directly to rankings and other strategic objectives.
Designing competitive recruiting and benefits strategies
- Industry sponsor: Pueo
- Capstone team members: Lennox Wolak, Julian Graves, Nick Comer, and Sabrina Duque-Lewis
The Pueo capstone team utilized industry benchmarking, in-depth recruiting trend analysis, and interviews with HR experts to provide recommendations for streamlining Pueo’s benefits package. Team members provided smart, targeted options for reducing costs, including an adjustable financial model to measure the impact of potential changes, and offered recommendations designed to preserve employee morale and company culture.
Enhancing the new account opening process to increase approvals
- Industry sponsor: ValleyStar Credit Union
- Capstone team members: Kayleigh Hritsik, Peter Hughes, Joseph Dudi Miabok, and Federico Bruno
To help ValleyStar Credit Union modernize its account opening process, students mapped the entire workflow from both employee and member perspectives and developed a performance measurement framework. With this roadmap, ValleyStar can deliver a faster, more user-friendly digital onboarding experience, strengthening its competitive edge in member growth. The team's analysis projects that with the new process, approvals will increase by nearly 130 percent, resulting in an additional $8 million per year in customer deposits.
Laying the foundation for enterprise AI at X-energy
- Industry sponsor: X-energy
- Capstone team members: Scott Sculley, Ryan Mason, Grace Lowry, Advay Prakash, Angelica Wilhelm
X-energy, an advanced small modular reactor company, needed to turn widespread employee interest in AI into a coordinated, strategic capability. The student team met with leaders across the company, identifying 36 potential use cases across departments, building and testing five proof-of-concept models on secure internal systems, and estimating up to 79 percent time savings on repetitive tasks. The team’s early work laid the groundwork for a new AI department within X-energy, and saved the company’s new AI director months of startup work.