Students from NC State (Ben Blackburn, Allison Dobyns and Liana Lessard) and NC A&T (Ayush Bodhale and Christian Cox) worked together on a senior design project for Herbalife. They focused on reducing long changeover times at Herbalife’s Winston-Salem plant. This teamwork led to big improvements and strong results.
Fixing a Slow Changeover Process
Herbalife’s HIM plant had a slow and wasteful changeover process. This process involved taking down, cleaning, checking and resetting machines. The student team studied the process and found ways to reduce wasted time and effort.
“Our project involved streamlining the changeover process (which includes the takedown, manual cleaning, inspection and reassembly of equipment between production runs) on Herbalife’s packaging lines,” said Ayush Bodhale. “The primary goal of our project was to reduce the lengthy current changeover time through identifying and eliminating non-value-adding wastes in the process.”
“To quote one of our stakeholders, Herbalife was ‘blown away’ with our work and believes our team has laid the foundation for more joint projects between NC A&T and NC State in the future,” Bodhale said.
Learning Important Lessons
This project let students use what they had learned in real life. They also had to communicate well and stay organized.
“Senior design itself is essentially the culmination of all the work you did for four years combined, so I enjoyed putting together all the things I have learned and making it one coherent project,” said Christian Cox. “The most important lesson to me would be how essential communication is to everything, whether it’s talking to a technician on the site to get feedback on a process or just reaching out to the group to make sure everyone knows what they should be working on. Great communication drives high performance.”
Liana Lessard said they learned to send documents early so deadlines were not missed.
“We learned to send any documents for our sponsor to review, with a week buffer time, to ensure we did not turn in anything late for our class. We also found it very helpful to have a ‘standing’ weekly meeting with Herbalife to have continuous communication and help throughout the project. To make sure we were working and moving in the right direction that their team wanted us to work on.”
Working Across Universities
This was the first time students from NC State and NC A&T worked together on this type of project. It worked well but had challenges.
“I really enjoyed this unique joint-university collaboration,” said Bodhale. “One major advantage was the exposure to diverse perspectives and skill sets as both schools emphasize different things in their ISE curriculum and people brought different skills from their past internship experiences. This made our team very well rounded and allowed us to approach this problem holistically.”
Communication and coordination posed a significant challenge for the team. Everyone was very busy throughout the semester, and the students from A&T had different class schedules and limited availability. This made it difficult for the group to find time to meet. Most of their meetings had to take place online. Unlike teams from the same university, they couldn’t talk during class, stay in touch easily or meet in person to collaborate or practice. They had to give up some of their personal time to attend Friday meetings with both their team and Herbalife, as well as to practice their presentations on Zoom.
Christian Cox said the different backgrounds helped the group solve problems in unique ways.
“The joint project with NC State was a great opportunity to collaborate with students that may have a different perspective based on their experiences and teaching styles at different universities. I feel like this was the main advantage as there were times when we all saw things differently allowing us to solve problems in unique ways. The main challenge for everyone was just our conflicting schedules and the distance of the universities which did not allow us to meet in person as much as we would like. Overall I believe it was highly beneficial and enjoyed by all of my team members.”
Liana Lessard shared that different class topics sometimes made working together harder.
“The advantages of collaborating with students from another university was great for learning about a different ISE curriculum seeing what NC A&T emphasis vs what NC State ISE departments emphasize. This allowed us to provide Herbalife with different types of solutions and presentations of the information using our different academic strengths. The challenges would be the fact that the senior design courses taught different things in lecture which meant we had to debrief classes with one another during the group zoom meetings which took away from actually working on the project. Also we only ever got to practice presenting our group presentations over zoom.”
Winning Recognition
The team’s hard work paid off.
“I’d like to mention that our team (specifically Christian and I as this was an A&T event) won the Best Overall Poster Award at the North Carolina A&T College of Engineering 12th Annual Senior Design Expo last Wednesday Apr 23 2025. This was across posters presented from all engineering disciplines. It was extremely rewarding to be recognized after the months of hard work that went into this project,” said Bodhale.