About the Capstone Project

Put a Team of Engineers On Your Project This Spring

Over the past 9 years, teams of graduating seniors enrolled in Boston University's BS Program in Manufacturing Engineering have undertaken real-world engineering projects for Boston area companies.  The response from the sponsoring firms has been uniformly enthusiastic.  Teams of bright undergraduate students apply their analytic skills and technical learning’s to a project with a local company.  The team’s deliverables include a solution of quantifiable value and practical application.  Many of the firms also use the engineering projects to evaluate some of the nation's top students for potential employment.

This in-plant project experience is for academic credit and is known as the Senior Capstone Design course.  The Department of Manufacturing Engineering requires students to complete a Capstone experience culminating their four years of undergraduate education.   If your company could benefit from fresh perspectives applied to a specific technical problem, we invite you to consider being one of our participating sponsors.

Here are some quick facts:

• Many students have about 6 months of work experience through prior Co-op and internship work.

• Students self-select into teams of three or four and bring distinct skills to the project, including: 
  
  • proficiency in materials and manufacturing processes:  understanding the behavior and properties of materials as they are altered and influenced by processes in manufacturing
    
  • process, assembly and product engineering:  understanding the design of products and equipment, tooling, and the environment necessary for their manufacture
    
  • manufacturing competitiveness:  understanding the creation of competitive advantage through manufacturing planning, strategy and control
    
  • manufacturing systems design:  understanding the analysis, synthesis, and control of manufacturing operations using statistical and calculus based methods, simulation and information technology

• The spring consulting project lasts for approximately 14 weeks, from mid January through April.  During this time, teams will meet with their lead engineering contact and others, as appropriate, on a weekly basis.  Students spend roughly 8-16 hours per week at the company and an additional 10-20 hours per week working on analyzing data and developing their recommendations.

Previous Capstone sponsors include: 
BOC Edwards, Raytheon, BTU International, Boston Scientific, Gillette, Teradyne, Cisco Systems, Malden Mills, New Balance, Polar Beverages, PerkinElmer, GE Aircraft Engines, Lucent Technologies, Axcelis Technologies, Becton Dickinson, and Vicor.  If you are interested in becoming one of our sponsoring companies or would like more information, please call Professor Ted de Winter at 617-353-9893 or tdw@bu.edu.      

Our experience with the Capstone project has been extremely successful for both the students and the participating organizations, encompassing the completion of a wide variety of projects such as:

• Design of an inventory tracking and storage system using process modeling for a medical device company;

• Redesign of a manufacturing cell layout, assembly process, and quality inspection procedure for a semiconductor company;

• Using designed experiments to identify the source of an assembly contamination problem for a fiber optic device manufacturer;

• Comparative analysis and design of a new bicycle system utilizing DFMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly);

• Improved design and assembly of PCB devices for a test equipment manufacturer;

• Analysis and improvement of a manufacturing quality process for an electronic equipment company;

• Development of a capacity analysis model for production planning for a start-up visual communications company.