Capstone Team Upgrades Caterpillar Project Dashboard

Global manufacturing giant Caterpillar has turned to Engineering capstone Team 24024 to build a flexible project management system that could be used in its company operations, and potentially around the globe.

Caterpillar sponsored the capstone team to build a tracking dashboard, dubbed CAT Hub, that delivers data to administrators and executives that is customized to their needs. CAT Hub will be in frequent use, said Sardar Mostofa, the faculty mentor and an instructor in the Interdisciplinary Capstone program.

“Caterpillar is envisioning using this across the board, not just in one facility,” he explained. “They have similar systems in place, but they are isolated and only operational for certain departments or facilities. This one is going to be organization-wide.”

The dashboards Caterpillar uses now are rigid, in terms of the parameters, said Basarajav Patil, program coordinator at Caterpillar and project advisor to the capstone team: “CAT Hub could be used in different domains. Imagine it’s for sales. It would roll up all the figures and projects related to that, and we could look at the resource requirements of the user, whether facility or division level, or higher.”

Many capstone projects have a two-year timeline, with a new team of seniors taking over and advancing to completion the work of the prior year’s students. CAT Hub was a one-year project, and was an intense process for the students.

“It’s fully a software project, and we only have two software engineers on the team. I’ve done some coding but not full stack development,” said Ibraheem Sarwar, an engineering management major and the student project leader. “One of the challenges was understanding how the backend of a program connects to the frontend. But where there's a will, there's a way, and if you put in enough effort, you can get it done.”