2025 Carter Machinery Team
Identifying Decision Makers for Smarter Sales
At A Glance:
Capstone Sponsor: Carter Machinery
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Shilpa Rao
Capstone Team Members: Lance Dalton, Seamus Denevan, Jenna Feldman, Hannah Finnell, Julia Fixsen
Solution Summary: Created a Key Decision Maker (KDM) output system that transformed 489,000 purchase order records into to 21,000 unique decision makers with ~96% name match accuracy and ~93% purchase attribution accuracy, ready for Carter's sales team to target.
The Challenge
Carter Machinery, a leading equipment solutions provider, needed clearer insight into who drives purchasing decisions among their many small business customers. Although Carter had extensive customer data, inconsistent records and incomplete contact details made it difficult to pinpoint key decision makers — limiting the effectiveness of marketing outreach and sales targeting.
The Solution
The student team tackled the problem by designing a Key Decision Maker (KDM) output system to clean, match, and enrich customer contact data. They began with 489,000 raw work order records, which were often riddled with inconsistencies and duplicate entries. Using a layered approach — from Excel pre-cleaning formulas to advanced fuzzy matching and phone normalization in Python — the team reduced this massive dataset to about 21,000 unique decision makers with ~96% accuracy in name matching and ~93% accuracy in purchase attribution.
They then built interactive Tableau dashboards to visualize these insights clearly for Carter’s marketing team. Users can easily filter by company and quickly identify high-value contacts based on their purchasing activity — helping Carter target the right people with tailored messaging.
The Impact
By automating and refining this data, Carter’s marketing team can now quickly generate accurate, up-to-date contact lists for high-potential small customers. Over time, cleaner, centralized customer data will enable deeper segmentation, better cross-selling and upselling, and more personalized communication. The project is projected to help Carter’s team reallocate staff hours away from repetitive manual tasks and focus more on strategic relationship building — ultimately boosting revenue without additional headcount.
2025 Carter Machinery Team Public Presentation