A team of students was working in calculated sprints to design a manufacturing ready machine when the company that sponsored their capstone cancelled it in February 2025.
They would unexpectedly bring their design to a manufacturing design competition and take home first place.
The team, nicknamed “Smooth Operators,” was tasked at the beginning of the year with improving the design of a previous year’s capstone: an automated sanding machine for acrylic awards made to be easily integrated into multiple production lines.
Jackson Clark, the capstone team’s project manager, says the team strived to optimize the machine’s design through collaboration, communicating each decision and action with precision before moving forward.
However, each team member was devastated when their project had to come to a complete stop and they had to find a way to accredit their last six months of hard work and planning on their own.
Echo Peterson, structural lead of the capstone team, remembers the decision they had to make.
"Giving up at this point would have been the easier path, but we had made a commitment as a team to do the best we could, and we still had some motivation behind us," Peterson said.
The Smooth Operators discovered the ASME/SME Student Manufacturing Design Competition near the end of the school year, which presented the perfect opportunity to finish their capstone.
Their collaboration continued as they compiled a paper and extensive appendix to display their work. The team entered the competition “with the satisfaction that [they] had completed [their] senior capstone project,” Peterson said.
Later—on graduation day in April 2025, as each member of the team received their diploma—they were pleasantly surprised to receive the news that they were finalists in the competition.
Hunter Davis, the programmable logic controller (PLC) lead of the team, prepared a brief presentation of their project with the team and attended the North American Manufacturing Research Conference (NAMRC) on July 24, 2025 to share the team’s design on stage.
The Smooth Operators won the first place prize of $1000 for the quality of their presentation, creativity of their design, and integrity of the analysis and test approach of their project’s manufacturability. The team didn’t expect victory, but their hard work spoke for itself, Clark says.
“Receiving the first place award was surprising to me because I didn’t feel like we made anything incredible,” Clark said. “Our approach to the project set us apart from other teams in the competition because we were hyper-focused on our end customer and delivering the best product we could.”
Peterson believes that the day they decided to put forward a unified group effort is the day they made the first steps to winning the competition. Now, they are applying their learning and successes into their own careers after graduation.
"We are able to take our experience of facing failure and coming out on top to every challenge we face in the future," Peterson said.
Clark recognizes two skills he developed from his experience with this capstone team: using failure as a learning advantage and staying accountable to each person involved in the development of a project, including team members and eventual customers.
"My team and I decided we were going to fail fast and fail forward, and through our quick fails, we progressed quickly," Clark said.
The Smooth Operators team was composed of six 2025 graduates in manufacturing engineering: Jackson Clark, Hunter Davis, Orin Sommers, Benjamin Diehl, Aaron Rathke, and Echo Peterson.