It’s hard to motivate students about how important forecasting is in OM with common examples like IBM’s stock price, Dell sales, 
or housing starts. So in Ch.4 we have two tools to help set the stage. The first is the Global Company Profile featuring Disney World. Disney does detailed daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and 5-year forecasts of park attendance, with a staff of 35 analyzing a whole flock of interesting variables. The second tool is the 8-min. video case study we created on how Hard Rock Cafe uses forecasting.
Students like the Hard Rock video not only because the company is “cool”, but because the applications of moving averages and regression are clever and thoughtful. For example, multiple regression is used to estimate the price elasticity of each menu item. Hard Rock is able to estimate the impact of a $1 price increase of cheeseburgers on sales of chicken sandwiches and margaritas.
The weighted moving average technique is used to set sales and bonus targets for store managers. The company also uses exponential smoothing and other models to forecast daily sales/food needs, purchasing needs, and borrowing needs. A good lead-in to the video is to ask students what they think Hard Rock needs to forecast with mathematical models.
Dr. Render,
How can I get these videos? I would like to include these videos in my class teaching which I think will attract students’ attention and give them an interesting view of the company.
Best,
RICKY Tan
Ricky,
I will send you a copy.
Barry
Dr. Render,
Could I get the copy, too? I want to try it in my OM course.
Best regards,
Seongjre Ahn
Absolutely! Anyone teaching from our OM books gets free access to the whole 31 video case study series. They are also free within the MyOMLab assessment software, which means students can watch them on-line whenever they like.You just need to tell your Pearson/Prentice Hall sales rep and they will get the disks to you.
Dr. Render,
Please, could I get the copy, too? I wish to use the video to teach my students management operations here in Peru. The video is very interesting.
Best regards,
Nicolas Villarruel
Prof. Villarruel, yes. As I a have noted in earlier comments, anyone teaching from our OM books gets free access to all 35 of the videos in our series. They are also free within the MyOMLab assessment software, which means students can watch them on-line whenever they like.You just need to tell your Pearson rep in South America.
Dear Prof. Render,
I would like to use this video in my class. Can I have a copy?
Thanks in advance,
Dr. Kumar Chunduri
Thank you for writing, Dr. Chunduri. Yes, the whole series of 35 videos is available free to any adopter through your Pearson rep. And any student using MyOMLab also has all the videos loaded into that learning system. Unfortunately, we can not give access to non-adopters as these videos cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create and are tailored specifically to chapters in our textbooks.