On any given day, the College of Engineering’s diverse and dedicated faculty, students and alumni produce significant research contributions through peer-reviewed journal articles, scholarly books and book chapters. Learn more about those contributions in this month’s Research Roundup. If you would like your work to be included in a future roundup, submit your research here.

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Mohamed Awwad and Madison Pierce

Engineering management alumni Madison Pierce and industrial and manufacturing engineering associate professor Mohamed Awwad recently published the article “Optimization of E-Commerce Inventory and Logistics Operations: Case Study for a Small Board Game Retailer, ‘All You Need Is Wine’” in ISE Magazine. The article presents a data-driven approach to improving demand forecasting, inventory management and supply chain operations for a small e-commerce business and is based on Pierce’s Cal Poly master’s degree project.

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What does it take to rescue a small wine-themed board game company from overstocking fees and seasonal stockouts? For engineering management alumni Pierce, the answer was a combination of industrial engineering and creative problem-solving.

The project, completed as part of Pierce’s engineering management master’s capstone, was sponsored by Cal Poly Engineering alumni Carlene and Dan Iverson, co-owners and co-founders of All You Need Is Wine, LLC. Working under Awwad, Pierce tackled the operational challenges facing the small e-commerce business, using two years of historical sales data to build demand forecasts, calculate optimal reorder points and economic order quantities, and propose a redesigned hybrid fulfillment strategy through Amazon Warehousing & Distribution. She also developed a custom Streamlit dashboard, giving the Iversons a self-service tool to track inventory and anticipate replenishment needs in real time.

The project is predicted to save more than $1,000 annually in Amazon storage fees, and the new forecasting framework helped the company avoid stockouts during its first holiday season with the system in place.

Pierce has since moved into a role as a supply planner at a major medical technology company and credits the project, now featured in the June 2026 issue of ISE Magazine, as a prime example of Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing approach in action.

Read the full article here.