Facility layouts, lean workflows, and the automation that keeps them honest. Currently at Siemens, building a new warehouse receiving operation from a blank floor plan.
I'm Felton Walton, an Industrial Engineering student at the University of Texas at Arlington and a Terry Foundation Scholar, currently interning at Siemens in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
Over the past year and a half at Siemens I've moved from the manufacturing floor — time studies, line balancing, 5S — to leading project work on a new inbound receiving facility: business cases, CapEx forecasting, floor plan design, and sourcing custom equipment directly with fabricators. I like problems where the physical layout, the workflow, and the numbers all have to agree.
Along the way I've picked up a habit of automating the boring parts — AutoLISP scripts that generate label sheets and parts catalogs in AutoCAD, simulation models in Witness, and an AI assistant built with a classmate that answers campus navigation questions from official university documents.
Before any of that, I learned operations the direct way: running my own mobile vending business since 2021, where every wasted step comes out of your own day.
End-to-end design of a new inbound receiving operation: a multi-zone floor plan for pallet breakdown and sortation, custom workstation specs built around ball-transfer tables, and a 3D walkthrough model presented to leadership.
AutoLISP tools that turn CSV data into finished drawings: a batch generator for Kanban sticker labels with barcodes, and an auto-plotting parts catalog that documents standard components without manual drafting.
An AI assistant that answers campus navigation questions from official UT Arlington documents, combining a Random Forest intent classifier with a retrieval-augmented pipeline. Presented at UTA Innovation Day; co-authored an academic manuscript on the system.
Led a team analyzing 500K flight records to predict delays: automated the data preparation in Excel, compared regression and tree-based models to isolate 17 key predictors, and proposed a standard-work dashboard for gate-crew line balancing.
I host Refereed, a podcast on referrals, reputation, and how small businesses grow — conversations with owners and operators about what actually brings customers through the door.