Month: February 2014

OM in the News: Clustering Technology and the Danish Pig

hogsEvery weekday 20,000 pigs are delivered to the Danish Crown company’s slaughterhouse in central Denmark, writes The Economist (Jan.4, 2014). They trot into the stunning room, guided by workers armed with giant fly swats. They are hung upside down, divided in two, shaved of their bristles and scalded clean. A machine cuts them into pieces, which are then cooled, boned and packed.

The slaughterhouse is enormous, ten football fields long with 7 miles of conveyor belts. Its managers attend to the tiniest detail. The fly-swatting workers wear green rather than white because this puts the pigs in a better mood. The cutting machine photographs a carcass before adjusting its blades to its exact contours. The company calibrates not only how to carve the flesh, but also where the various parts will fetch the highest prices.

Denmark is a tiny country, with 5.6 million people and wallet-draining labor costs. But it is an agricultural giant, home to 30 million pigs and numerous global brands. In 2011, farm products made up 20% of its goods exports. The value of food exports grew from $5.5 billion in 2001 to $22 billion in 2011. The government expects it to rise by a further $9 billion by 2020.

Why, in a post-industrial economy, is the food industry still thriving? Much of the answer lies in a cluster in the central region of the country. The cluster includes several big companies, which act as its leading investors: Danish Crown, Arla, Rose Poultry and DuPont Danisco.  Plenty of smaller firms are also sprouting, which act as indicators of nascent trends and incubators of new ideas. Interestingly, among the Danish public, distaste for “factory farming” is increasing. Borgen, a popular television political drama, devoted an entire episode to criticizing pig farming.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is clustering so important (see Chapter 8)?

2. How is technology impacting the food processing industry?

Teaching Tip: Bite Sized Operations Management Lectures

lecture hallA recent article about MOOCs, by the American Society of Engineering Education, has interesting implications for those of us interested in flipped teaching or teaching with technology, two big trends in higher education. The 1st conclusion is that teaching MOOCs is not at all like lecturing, even when literally delivering lectures online. Recording a 50 minute lecture for a MOOC will make for an unpopular online course. Teaching to the iPhone generation means that short segments of 6-9 minutes are mandated.

To teach to a diverse audience, “it’s good to have bite-sized content,” advises a Georgia Tech prof who has distilled his topics into short modules and “edu-bytes” of no more than 10 minutes. A Cal-Berkeley prof has reorganized his 90-minute lecture into 8-to-12-minute video segments, or “lecturelets”, each covering a topic with 1-2 self-check questions. Evidence from the field suggests shorter is sweeter. New data from edX, a nonprofit MOOC provider created by MIT and Harvard, for instance, put the optimal length for lecturelets at 6 to 9 minutes. Median viewing time, where half the students watch the entire clip, peaks at 6 minutes, then falls rapidly.

MOOCs require “a huge amount of work,” adds a UC Davis prof who devotes two full days preparing each 60-to 90-minute lecture. To maximize his instruction time, he writes 8 pages covering not only exactly what he will say, including jokes, but what he will draw. It takes 8 hours to record the lecture, stopping, starting, and rewriting as necessary. The editing crew needs 32 hours to synchronize the audio, screen casts, and video into a complete lecture. It takes 5 to 10 hours to produce each hourlong lecture video.

We are all well aware of the need to spark up our lectures, be they in a small class, a lecture hall, or on-line. Jay and I believe our 35 short company videos and many of the exercises we note in this blog (look back to the scores of Teaching Tips posts over the past 3 years) may help create an exciting classroom atmosphere.