A team of business students from U. Central Florida won the College of Business Administration’s annual Capstone Case Competition for introducing their idea of a Smart Cart device to Target.
Darden Johnson, Bradley Mansilla, Adrian Melendez, Michael McGriskin, Brandon Robertson, Alvin Smith and Ryan Thomas, all business majors, comprised the winning team.
The competition took place during the entire spring semester with the winners announced in May.
One hundred twenty-five teams made up of business students took part in the competition.
The competition combines all areas — be it accounting, management, economics, marketing, general business or finance — within the College of Business Administration into a single endeavor. All business students, regardless of their majors, must participate.
The competition requires teams to demonstrate their knowledge by confronting problems faced by a specific business. This year, the chosen business was Target.
“Target was chosen because of its business structure, current situation, student familiarity and company potential,” said Laurence Putchinski, the lab instructor of the winning team.
“A suitable firm is selected for analysis early in the semester by the Capstone Team, student groups are formed and the concepts of strategic management are then shared with the students during the ensuing lectures and lab exercises.”
The competition worked as follows: First, each team composed a paper and presentation of their strategic analysis to tackle Target’s problems.
Each lab instructor then chose one of their groups to go on to the semifinals to present in front of a panel of Target executives and graduate business students.
Members of those panels then chose one team each to advance on to the finals. The final panel consisted of five members — a CEO, CFO, a Wall Street Journal executive and two high-ranking Target executives. That panel chose the winner.
Target executives listed business concerns and ways they wanted to improve to the Capstone Team. These concerns included a need for increased guest frequency, profitability and engagement in customer service interest.
To address those concerns, the winning team thought of an innovative concept called Smart Cart.
Basically, the Smart Cart is a shopping cart with a smart phone compatible LCD touch-screen.
The Smart Cart would have a running inventory of products in every Target store, provide product location and as a customer scanned the items, the cart would keep tally of the total price of their purchases.
There would also be an iPhone application for the device that would allow a customer to create a customer shopping list in advance and then open that list on the LCD screen.
Also, like the iPhone, the cart can be upgraded over the Internet and have an endless amount of downloadable applications.
“We saw that Target was looking to expand the grocery sector of their stores while continuing to focus on low prices and a high level of service,” said McGriskin, the leader of the winning team. “We felt that our recommendation addressed these challenges by helping to make the grocery shopping experience easier of the customers.”
In its presentation, the team gave specifics of how simple shopping would be with Smart Cart.
“There would also be recipe recommendations in the cart’s system that the guest can search through and select,” McGriskin said. “The interactive shopping list would then display the locations and the price of all the items needed. As the guest scans each item into the cart, it checks it off for them. We actualized the Target mission, which is ‘Expect more, pay less.’ ”
Winning the Capstone Competition was no easy feat for the team. According to McGriskin, they met several challenges along the way. Seven different perspectives also meant seven different schedules.
“Between the seven of us, we had a wealth of ideas and knowledge to pull from,” McGriskin said. “Keeping us all on the same page, even though it was difficult for us to find meeting times where we all could all be present, was a challenge. We worked around it by utilizing conference calls for our absent members.”
The seven members won a $4,000 scholarship, dinner gift cards and plaques.