Cohort 33 during QUEST Camp in August 2019.
Put on your best suit jacket and settle into your seats, because it’s that time of the year again: Cohort 33 is stepping through their routers and into a virtual semester of 490H this spring! Representing the culmination of four semesters of experiential learning under the guidance of the Quality Guild, the students will be applying the design thinking, process improvement, data analysis, and collaboration skills developed throughout the sequence of core QUEST courses. This semester’s clients are representing a particularly diverse range of industries from defense contractors to nonprofits. In just a few short months, students will be presenting their work with one of ten unique corporate partners.
QUEST is partnering with several returning clients as well as new clients this spring. Northrop Grumman, a well-established aerospace and defense contractor, has returned as a long-time partner, sponsoring 22 projects since taking flight with QUEST in 2009. They identified an opportunity for students to look at the “passing of the torch” of knowledge from senior engineers to engineers joining new programs. This project serves as a follow up to the fall 2020 project through which team Knowledge Quest recommended utilizing the knowledge management platform “ServiceNow” to compile expertise across the organization’s financial sector. Now, the team is tasked with determining how to most effectively go about collecting and entering senior employee knowledge into the ServiceNow system.
Oceaneering, a four-time partner of the QUEST Honors Program, is back with another project in their Oceaneering Technologies (OTECH) Division. As the company performs a wide range of operations in the government and public sectors, performing these operations as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible is critical. This semester’s project centers on the division’s labor and general cost estimation processes and how their existing estimation strategies can be updated, used more effectively, and where any pain points may appear in the process.
If quarantine has you ready for a trip to a sandy beach far from the shoreline, grab your sea legs and join this semester’s team working with Chessie Marine! Located in Elkton, Maryland, the returning organization is the Mid-Atlantic’s largest inboard boat dealer. In their second project with the QUEST Honors Program, students will be analyzing the layout of Chessie Marine’s showroom, service center, and boat lot in order to identify bottlenecks throughout their operations and make recommendations to optimize systems while also adjusting for seasonality. With a strong emphasis on the voice of the customer, Chessie Marine will be ready to serve its clients better than ever while summer is just around the corner.
As COVID-19 testing has become a priority across numerous industries, PAE, a defense and government logistics contractor, has been selected by the Southeastern Conference (SEC) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association to provide COVID-19 testing services for in-season sports at 14 universities. In their second partnership with the QUEST Program, the client’s project requires the team to assess the efficiency of the current testing process and determine how to improve this characteristic, while also improving the data tracking and forecasting capabilities of the organization.
Tronox, who is also returning for their second QUEST project, is a vertically integrated producer of titanium dioxide and a plethora of related products, which are essential to producing high-quality paints, plastics, papers, and other products used in everyday life. Managing such an operation requires regular repair and maintenance of equipment in order to meet production needs in an erosive environment. Managing the availability of repairable spares, which are used to fix any damagement equipment, is essential to ensuring operations can continue as expected. The QUEST team will use benchmarking and processes analysis strategies, among other skills, to improve the efficiency of Tronox’s Hamilton, Mississippi plant under the creation of a uniform process for the comprehensive management of repairable spares.
QUEST is also very excited to welcome numerous first-time clients into QUEST’s Capstone course, including D&H Distributing, Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), Junior Achievement of Greater Washington (JA), the Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation – Innovate Parks and Recreation Task Force, and ZEND Health! Each new client has presented an exciting set of challenges to students and offers an incredible opportunity for students to gain new professional skills and experiences.
D&H Distributing is focusing on their buyer dashboard, which serves as the primary point of information for buyers. As the system is updated weekly, the company is interested in how they can take this system one step further in order to provide better prices, better experiences, and better services for their customers. Students will be journey mapping the buyer’s experience, while also optimizing the existing process to meet the strategic needs of their client.
In their first time partnership with QUEST, Facebook Reality Labs is bringing a unique project topic to the Zoom room. Remember all of those checkboxes you marked and terms you agreed to when signing up for your favorite social media platform? Probably not – and this issue hasn’t gone unnoticed. The real question is how might a company go about improving the user experience with in-product legal disclosures? This QUEST team will have to combine user design experience and process improvement strategies to provide a creative solution, meeting both user and legal needs.
As a non-profit committed to improving financial literacy in the DMV, Junior Achievement of Greater Washington, also known as JA, is looking to revamp their volunteer workflow process to start serving communities better than ever upon resuming in-person JA Financial Park programming. As volunteers are at the root of the organization’s success, optimizing processes to emphasize ease of scheduling and providing each and every volunteer with the best experience allows the organization to provide students financial literacy education even more effectively.
The Prince George’s County Department of Parks and Recreation Innovate Parks and Recreation Taskforce is partnering with QUEST to improve staff engagement in their Eyes Have It initiative, through which employees in the field can make recommendations on future projects. These submissions are evaluated, and some are selected as new initiatives by the Prince George’s County Parks and Recreation Department. With the goal of increasing engagement of the program among employees, the Taskforce is requesting students assess the effectiveness of the current process and create recommendations to increase program awareness and submission rates.
This spring’s final new partner, ZEND Health, is a Maryland-based company working to fight the COVID-19 pandemic through the production of robots capable of sanitizing and sterilizing buildings and spaces. The 22nd century technology is only being improved as time progresses and now ZEND Health is offering QUEST a hand in its efforts. Focusing on various fronts, this project requires the team to consider the original KRUZR 1 and refined KRUZR 2 models, including their respective customer bases, demand for each model, and how these products might be used in the future.
The QUEST Honors Program hopes this semester is as fruitful for each corporate partner as for the teams providing services, as students, faculty, and partners alike excitedly await the QUEST Conference on Thursday, May 6, 2021 (Save the Date!). As Cohort 33 students begin their 490H experience, everyone at QUESTPress is wishing the best of luck to all of the student teams and a very special thank you to the Quality Guild and Corporate Partners who make it all possible! See you at the QUEST Conference!