Team Darin

Team Participants:

  • Yadid Alamilla 

  • Kiko Barr 

  • Trupal Patel 
  • Emmanuel Okposio 
  • Thanh Ha 

“We’re excited to have tackled a real-world problem and developed solutions that can genuinely impact the university’s operations. This experience has been both challenging and rewarding.”

Problem

Darin Matthews, the Chief Procurement Officer at Cal Poly SLO, faces challenges in obtaining cost-effective shipping options and lacks visibility into the university’s spending data. Specifically, he cited an instance where they paid $2,000 for shipping a product from Utah, but later found a broker who could have shipped it for $700, resulting in significant savings. Additionally, accessing comprehensive spending information requires manually going through thousands of purchase orders, which is a time-consuming process.

Technical Solution

The team developed a shipping agent that prompts users for product details, shipping origin, and destination, and provides a list of shipping options from major carriers, allowing Darin to select the most cost-effective option. They also created a data dashboard that provides visibility into the university’s spending across categories like goods, services, construction, and IT. This dashboard displays top suppliers, product breakdowns, and allows for data export, enabling Darin to make informed decisions and track expenditures efficiently.

Showcase

Presentation RecordingA recording of AI Summer Camp students presenting their project.
SlideshowThe accompanying slides shown in the video.
Source CodeAll of the code and assets developed during the course of the AI Summer Camp.

About the DxHub

The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.