Milwaukee Skyline

The Industry Connect program allows your company to utilize UWM’s Lubar College of Business as an extension of your operations by tapping into Lubar students and faculty for project work.

Student Projects

Student projects serve a business need for your company while allowing Lubar students to gain valuable real-world experience. Advanced students in the Lubar College of Business work on project deliverables over the course of a semester under the joint supervision of Lubar faculty and a sponsoring partner representative. Projects are assigned to 1 or 2-student consultant teams, dependent on your project scope, with each working 20 hours per week during the school year. Longer working hours are possible over the summer term. Projects typically last one semester. Based on a project’s outcome, some industry partners choose to sponsor a project “next phase” or sponsor another project later.

Program flexibility exists for situations where a project start date cannot coincide with the start of a semester. Students are managed and paid as university employees and can work either at the Lubar College or the sponsoring company’s facilities. The Lubar College also works with you to manage protection of your business-proprietary information.

Cost: Project costs dependent on number of project team students and project duration.

Benefits

Sponsoring Partners benefit in several ways:

  • You engage more closely and observe students performing real project work to better consider those students for future, full-time employment
  • You work with and build relationships with expert Lubar College of Business faculty and leverage their knowledge, and
  • Sponsor Partners also benefit from reduced recruiting and administrative time and expenses to manage the students working in the Industry Connect program.

Students gain valuable real-world learning experience, along with earning stipends or credits. These students become more competitive in today’s job market.

Faculty members benefit by applying their knowledge to “real world” problems, while also maintaining currency in their skills. They also learn about current industry challenges, problems, and technologies which they can bring back to their classrooms and research.

Typical Industry Connect project ideas are provided for various business areas:

Key Benefits

  • Use Industry Connect to recruit great students for future employment.
  • Outsource project work to the Lubar College when faced with capacity or skill constraints.
  • Build deeper relationships with expert Lubar College faculty.
  • Realize project benefits at lower costs than most consulting firms.
Industry Connect Partners
Associated Bank
Briggs & Stratton
Eaton-Power Systems Group
Froedtert Health
MGIC
National Business Furniture
Rockwell Automation (with UWM CSI)
Wild Global
Zero Zone

“In the complex world of supply chain, the Lubar Business College was a great way for us to gain additional insight through the use of their Industry Connect program. We gained further knowledge on best practices, the student had hands-on, real-world experience and the college was engaged in each step of the process. It was a win, win, win for all. We will certainly be doing this program again.”

Jon Gallun
Vice President – Sales
Wild Global, a Division of Wild Marketing Group

Accounting & Finance
  • Assist with preparation of organization financial statements.
  • Perform financial analyses to:
    • Assist with merger transactions
    • Support decisions to distribute dividends or repurchase stock
    • Determine a private company’s valuation, or
    • Price the company’s stock for conducting an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
  • Analyze financial statements and financial ratios to develop capital structure recommendations.
  • Perform research on companies for investment purposes.
  • Compare different valuation methodologies to support decisions on major company projects.
  • Develop and/or manage financial databases using: Excel/VBA coding, WRDS, Bloomberg and FactSet data extraction, and statistical processing skills.
Data Analytics
  •   Analyze complex datasets using statistical and software tools to derive meaning from data using: JMP, R, Python, and/or Winbugs.
Human Resources & Management
  • Develop or update an organization’s Human Resources (HR) Handbook.
  • Assist with benchmark compensation research and compile compensation statistics.
Information Technology Management
  • Develop Desktop IT applications.
  • Configure and/or Re-configure SAP system structures.
  • Develop and code software programs using Object-oriented techniques.
  • Develop and code software programs in C#, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, or SQL.
  • Design and develop Databases using tools such as Oracle and Access.
  • Develop web-based applications.
Marketing
  • Develop a marketing plan for your business.
  • Develop and administer surveys to measure specified consumer characteristics, customer satisfaction levels, and customer attitudes and preferences.
  •  Calculate Return-on-Investment (ROI) for different marketing tools and recommend optimal marketing approaches, such as advertising, promotions, coupons, etc.
  • Work to identify different market segments and develop market segmentation reports.
Supply Chain & Operations Management
  • Perform in-depth supply chain data analysis using tools and techniques to find trends, cost savings and process improvements hidden in the data.
  • Build dashboards and decision-support tools (Excel) to manage inventory, equipment assets, facilities, labor, or production schedules.
  • Analyze a supply chain using Value Stream Mapping (VSM) tools to develop waste reduction plans or lead-time reductions.
  • Leverage the University of Wisconsin (UW) system library resources many paid subscriptions to answer key business questions to uncover insights not available through online searches.

Faculty Research Projects

Lubar faculty have deep expertise in many areas of business and can employ advanced research techniques to help you explore strategic opportunities or address business challenges. With advanced degrees from leading institutions, our faculty can provide a different vantage point, backed by data, to meet your project’s deliverables in the areas of marketing, human resources, information technology, data analytics, supply chain, accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, and management. There is an expectation that results from the research projects may be published in academic journals after masking all proprietary information.

Cost: Terms and conditions are set on a per-project basis, dependent on the project scope.

Contact

Shawn Vollmer
Outreach Program Manager
Lubar Hall, N479
414-251-7732
vollmesm@uwm.edu