CBA students share research
at annual university exhibition

This year’s 12th annual Student Research and Creative Endeavors Exhibition (SRCEE) gave dozens of Central Michigan University students the chance to share research, scholarship, and creative endeavors with professionals and the university community.

CBA student projects

Jimmy Dickinson:
Designing software for a pizza place
Management information systems senior Jimmy Dickinson’s SRCEE project began as a group classroom project to come up with a business problem and solve it. He chose a problem that had been plaguing his family’s pizza place for years – keeping track of customers and their orders.

“We created an order management system designed specifically for their needs,” Dickinson said. “It’s a prototype problem. We’ve tested it, and we’re working with another company to expand it. A software package will be influenced by this prototype.”

Dickinson enjoyed the experience of turning an academically derived project into a real-world business scenario and credits his project’s success on its user-friendliness.

Maritess Manalo:
Finding the best search engine on the Web
Second-year graduate student Maritess Manalo presented her paper, “A Comparison of the Performance of Metasearch Engine Versus Search Engine Results: An Exploratory Study.”

Manalo, who is studying information systems, found the subject interesting, although she knew that gathering the data would be difficult.

“I was curious as to why people don’t try alternatives to Google,” Manalo said. “I discovered there was a big overlap in results not only from Google but from Yahoo and Dogpile, which means they almost give the same results, but Dogpile has the advantage of including results from Yahoo and other search engines.”

Manalo likes most of her CBA courses because she learns by doing.

“These are real-world projects. And as a graduate assistant I find I’m doing work that assists me while giving me the opportunity to learn and get credit with something that will help me get a job,” Manalo said.

Manalo wants to combine her undergraduate degree in economics with information systems, business intelligence, and data mining in order to find her dream job as a business analyst.

Stacie Benson:
Researching trucking software packages
While working as a strategic analyst for Menlo Worldwide last year, Stacie Benson, ’99, M.B.A. ’04, turned a work assignment into an M.B.A. project.

Benson graduated from CMU with a logistics and marketing degree in 1999 and began working for Menlo Worldwide as a coordinator. She was promoted to analyst in 2000.

As a graduate student and employee, she took a close look at Menlo Worldwide, which manages the switching and general trucking operations for a major chemical company, and saw that some of its operational tasks included intra-plant moves and trailer management.

“This current process is paper intensive and very manual. It creates inefficiencies and data reporting inaccuracies,” Benson said.

“Management assigned me to research various software packages that will meet the needs of the switching and general trucking operations.”

Benson’s proposed solutions are expected to create efficiencies within the operation and improve reporting capabilities.

“My M.B.A. course work provided tools and methodology that could be applied in my everyday work. It helped strengthen my presenting and analytical skills while keeping me abreast of changes in the business world,” Benson said.

Senior Jimmy Dickinson meets with business information systems faculty member Zhenyu Huang to fine-tune his presentation for this year’s Student Research and Creative Endeavors Exhibition.