September 2015 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

OM in the News: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Sustainability

“In the last 20 years, life-cycle assessment (LCA) has grown from an academic exercise to an accepted decision making tool for sustainability management,” writes MIT Sloan Management Review (Sept. 22, 2015). As we note in Supplement 5 (Sustainability in the Supply Chain), a large number of companies, from UPS to Frito-Lay to Coke, employ LCAs in their sustainability work, often at substantial expense. At its roots, LCA is a method to quantify total sustainability impacts — like resource use and environmental damage — over the entire life of a product, from “cradle to grave.” While there is value in the basic exercise, the real utility of LCA is in comparing one product’s sustainability impacts with another’s. These comparisons can be made with existing products, or they can be made with future drawing board innovations.

Companies perform an LCA on existing products to assess baseline environmental performance. An LCA product profile will highlight “eco-hotspots” in the lifecycle, which are where the bulk of environmental impact occurs. At Siemens, an LCA of lighting found that the majority of environmental impact came from the use phase in customer’s homes and spurred the company to improve lamp efficiency. Alternatively, LCAs identify hotspots in manufacturing processes, as in the microchip industry, where LCA fingered toxic solvents in chip production as a major impact and led to cleaner substitutes like lemon juice.

When used as a product development tool, LCA can evaluate the environmental implication of design choices at each step of the development. Product modifications, such as new material choices, can be screened not just for immediate environmental impacts but impacts further down the life cycle — say, in the customer use phase or end-of-life. Levi Strauss used this approach when developing its Dockers WellThread line of clothing; through careful design choices it improved manufacturing, use, and end-of-life performance of its clothing. Improving LCA performance may also mean rethinking sourcing decisions. SC Johnson, for example, uses screening approaches to identify toxic materials in the inputs it purchases from suppliers and works to find more environmentally responsible substitutes.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is LCA now being frequently used as an operations tool?
Provide an example of how a company you are aware of could use LCA to improve its product line.

OM in the News: Volkswagen and Ethics

While VW cheated behind the scenes, it publicly espoused virtue, using the Super Bowl to run a commercial showing its engineers sprouting angel’s wings.

Volkswagen just got caught cheating, writes The New York Times (Sept. 27, 2015). The global auto giant finally admitted last week that it had installed software in 11 million diesel cars that misstated emissions tests, allowing the vehicles to spew far more deadly pollutants than regulations allowed. About 500,000 of the cars were sold in the U.S., including Passats made in Chattanooga. Disabling the emissions controls brought major advantages, including much better mileage — a big selling point in the firm’s push here.

In 2013, a nonprofit group proposed testing on-road diesel emissions from cars — something never done before, teaming up with California regulators. It was only by chance that the group’s testing of 3 vehicles began with 2 VWs and a BMW. Researchers hit the road, traveling 5 routes with varying terrain and traffic. Almost immediately, the 2 VWs set themselves apart from the BMW with much higher emissions. It was difficult to know what was going on: When the two VWs were placed on a “car treadmill,” they performed flawlessly.

By 2014, the California regulators alerted the E.P.A., which opened an investigation. VW fired back. “They tried to poke holes in our study and its methods, saying we didn’t know what we were doing,” said a researcher. “They were very aggressive. Meeting after meeting, they would try to explain it away.” For a year VW continued to maintain that there was a problem with the testers.

Then the regulators changed tack, examining the company’s software. Modern cars operate using millions of lines of computer code. The regulators made a startling discovery: A subroutine, or parallel set of instructions, was secretly being sent by the computer to what seemed to be the emissions controls. The revelations were stunning and VW’s push to dominate in America may have collapsed in one big lie.

Classroom discussion questions:

Discuss the ethical implications of this case.
How could so many VW engineers and executives have allowed the cover up to last for so long?

OM in the News: Starbucks Scheduling Software Makes the Headlines–Again

Starbucks employees protesting work conditions at a Starbucks in Decatur, Ga

Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has long presented the brand as involving its customers and employees in something more meaningful than a basic economic transaction. But Starbucks has once again has drawn fire for its workplace practices, reports The New York Times (Sept. 24, 2015). Last year, the firm vowed to provide store employees with more consistent schedules from week to week, and to post their schedules at least 10 days in advance. The company said it would stop asking workers to endure the sleep-depriving ritual known as a “clopening,” which requires them to shut down a store at night only to return early the next morning to help open it.

But in the last 2 years, the combination of a tight labor market and legal changes has raised labor costs for employers of low-skill workers. And there has long been another central obstacle to change: the incentives of store managers, who are encouraged by company policies to err on the side of understaffing. It often turns peak hours into an exhausting frenzy that crimps morale and drives workers away. (Starbucks employees are often responsible for finding their own replacements when they are sick. “A lot of times when I’m really sick, it’s less work to work the shift than to call around everywhere,” said one barista.)

On the question of scheduling, Starbucks uses Kronos state-of-the-art software that forecasts store traffic and helps managers set staff levels accordingly. Using the software to schedule workers 3 weeks in advance typically is not much less accurate than using it to schedule workers one week in advance. “The single best predictor of tomorrow is store demand a year ago,” says Kronos’ VP.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is scheduling in the service sector complex?
What benefits does Starbucks offer full-time and part-time employees that other food service operations do not?

Good OM Reading: Supply Chain Resilience

Semiconductor companies shaken by earthquakes; transportation companies battered by weather; retailers outwitted by rivals — nearly every company has endured some type of catastrophe, and then learned from its experience, disruption after disruption. For example, GM became more resilient with every crisis it faced, from the bankruptcy of its strategic supplier, Delphi, in 2005 to the Japan earthquake in 2012. “Technology is an increasingly important tool in the arsenal of resilience” writes MIT Sloan Management Review (Oct., 2015) .

From sensors to cloud computing to social media, various technologies can help prepare for, detect and manage disruption. Sensors can warn of impending events, from industrial accidents to earthquakes. When interconnected into Internet of Things networks, these smart devices can alert employees to a potential or existing disruption. During and after disasters, every human being on the scene can now be a sensor. Social media channels can provide an informal, real-time damage assessment. But even as technology makes it easier to detect and manage risk, it is also a major source of risk. A cyber-security breach can disrupt as much as an earthquake can– as the many retailers that fell victim to digital theft discovered in 2014. A large part of the problem is not rooted in sophisticated penetration of firewalls, but with insiders whose mobile devices are infected inside the firewall.

Collecting information from every source — weather reports, sensors, industrial intelligence — is only half the job. What organizations do with the information is key. The technology will sound the alarm, but the decision-making process that ensues is the real issue. Consider the actions taken by dispatchers when alerted to an earthquake in Mexico City a few years ago. Those empowered employees were able to shut down the subway system 40 seconds before the earthquake hit, avoiding a possible disaster. Employee empowerment illustrates a key difference between resilient and non-resilient companies: Resilient companies delegate to the lowest level. They organize in advance for disruption and consolidate crucial information in an emergency operations center. With the increasing use of cloud technologies, these centers can be virtual so that employees can work on the disruption, even from home.

OM in the News: Sensors and Sustainability–A New Look at Autos

Cheap, powerful, microscopic sensors are ubiquitously entering the $2 trillion automotive industry, reports Diamandis.com (Sept. 21, 2015). It’s a big, inefficient, wasteful and dangerous industry. Here’s how the annual numbers stack up for the U.S.:

33,000 lives are lost and a million injuries.
$230 billion of accident cost in the U.S. –about 2-3% of GDP.
50 billion hours (or 1 trillion dollars) of people’s time–around 8% of GDP.
50 billion gallons of imported gasoline (12-15% of the USA’s CO2 emissions).

Autonomous cars appear to be coming fast. Google is leading the way, but Apple, Tesla, Uber and every major car company is following. Today, Google’s self-driving cars have driven far more than 1.5 million miles, safely and fully autonomously. Google’s car are made possible because of their suite of sensors. One in particular is a 64-beam Velodyne LIDAR sensor (Laser Imaging Radar) that, combined with cameras, sonar and GPS, is collecting and analyzing 750 Mb of data per second. The car knows everything that’s happening within 100 meters of the sensor.

The impact: In 20 years there will be more than 54 million autonomous cars on the road, meaning:

Saved Lives: Autonomous cars don’t drive drunk, don’t text and don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Reclaiming Land: You can fit 8 times more autonomous cars on our roads. Today, in the U.S. we devote over 10% of the urban land to parking spaces and to our paved highways and roads.
Saved Energy: Today we give close to 25% of all of our energy to personal transportation, and 25% of our greenhouse gases are going to the car. If cars don’t crash, you don’t need a 5,000-lb SUV driving around a 100-lb passenger.
Saved Money/Higher Productivity: Trading out 4,000-lb. cars for lighter electric cars that don’t crash will save 90% on a person’s automotive transportation bill–plus regain 1- 2 hours of daily productivity, reclaiming hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. economy.

Classroom discussion questions:

In what other ways are sensors revolutionizing operations management?
What are the downsides of autonomous cars?

OM in the News: Airbus Lands in Alabama

The 1st A321 being inspected in the new plant in Mobile

Mardi Gras came early this year to Mobile, Ala., writes The New York Times (Sept. 20, 2015). Following a jazz band, a float bearing waving dignitaries and sequined musicians, was a column of flatbed trucks, laden with sections of fuselage, wings and tail components of an A321 jet that had just made the 3-week Atlantic crossing from an Airbus factory in Germany. They were on their way to a new Airbus assembly plant — its first civilian factory in the U.S. “I think Santa Claus has been here, and he’s left us an airplane,” said Mobile’s mayor.

The $600 million plant, on 116 acres, is the culmination of a courtship ritual, one of many playing out across the country as communities vie for attention and investment from foreign companies. Like many states and cities, Alabama and Mobile sweetened the deal for Airbus with generous tax breaks and other financial incentives. For Mobile, a city of 200,000, the prospect of 4,000 jobs with Airbus and its suppliers proved especially attractive. Unemployment there hovers at 8%, well above the national average.

Airbus’s foray into the U.S. forms part of a longer-term strategy. The company still lags far behind its rival, Boeing, in the U.S. market. As Japanese automakers did a generation ago, Airbus hopes that by producing aircraft that are “made in America,” it will be able to weaken Boeing’s advantage.

Airbus had eyed Mobile for years. The city’s deepwater port could accommodate ships carrying large structural parts from Europe. Freight trains run nearby, and the site, which is equipped with two long runways, is already home to small aviation maintenance companies and parts suppliers. Locating in Mobile would create a natural hedge against exchange-rate swings between the euro and the dollar and reduce some of the cost of transporting the $16.5 billion in components that Airbus buys from American aerospace suppliers each year. Labor costs were also substantially lower compared with Europe, and Alabama has a right-to-work law, which prevents unions from requiring workers to pay union dues.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why Mobile?
What are the disadvantages of opening a plant outside of Europe?

OM in the News: UPS Tries On 3-D Printing

At its hub in Louisville, Ky., UPS just rolled out 100 industrial-grade 3-D printers to make everything from iPhone gizmos to airplane parts. UPS wants to find out if 3-D printing centers could shorten supply chains and cut into its $58 billion-a-year transportation business—or give it a leg up in a potentially emerging market for local production and delivery. The difference could be existential. It doesn’t want 3-D printing to disrupt its business the way the Internet pulled the rug out from overnight document deliveries more than a decade ago. The company, writes The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 19-20, 2015), plans to expand next year with another 900 printers, and is looking at opening “print factories” outside the U.S. (Sales in the 3-D printing industry have risen 34% annually for the past 3 years).

UPS isn’t the only delivery company exploring the printing business. FedEx is examining the field, while Amazon.com has filed a patent for a 3-D printing truck, aimed at creating an on-demand system printing goods from inside delivery vehicles. UPS expects more companies will migrate some production to 3-D printing from traditional manufacturing on an aggressive growth curve.

In Louisville, UPS has used its own service. The company needed to develop a replacement floor beam support bracket for its fleet of Airbus A300 aircraft, which are out-of-production. 3-D printers made the part within hours and workers walked it across the runway for testing in a UPS plane.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is UPS so interested in 3-D printing?
What are the shortfalls of 3-D printers?

Teaching Tip: The Problem with Student Evaluations

Teaching evaluations are a part of our academic lives–and as such, they can bring joy and good feedback, as well as frustration and sadness. Recent research (see Faculty Focus, Sept. 16, 2015) verifies that when looking at small differences in student ratings (say a 4.05 vs. a 3.92), faculty and department chairs can draw unwarranted conclusions. That’s a problem when ratings are used–as they are– in decision-making processes regarding hiring, reappointment, tenure, promotion, merit increases, and teaching awards. Here are some ways to maintain your objectivity:

Aggregate your data. Look at your scores on individual items across different courses, taught during different semesters, and then look at overall ratings of your OM course across multiple sections over several years. If you see trends, you can think about drawing conclusions.

Look at how the instrument is defining good teaching. Rating instruments operationally define teaching. If they ask questions about giving lectures and about being organized, prepared, and fair, the instrument deems those items to be important characteristics of teaching.

Work for a realistic perspective on the results. Many of us are too vested in the numbers. Nonetheless, we can’t let their importance blind us to what they’re providing. Feedback on instruments offers a view of our teaching. It’s not a 360-degree panorama, but rather closer to the view provided by a small window.

Don’t look at the results for answers; use them to generate questions. What questions does your data set raise? What tentative explanations need further verification? If some of the data conflict, that’s a place to ask questions.

Let others help you find your way to the answers. Tell students you’ve got some questions about the results; you need more information. They can provide valuable feedback if they’re asked focused, specific questions, and if they think you care about their answers. Colleagues can help accurately interpret the results. They can tell us if they think we’re overreacting to negative feedback, or if a conclusion seems justified by the results. They can offer alternative explanations and brainstorm potential solutions.

OM in the News: GE’s Once Every 40 Year Location Decision

GE plans to make a decision shortly on whether to move its headquarters of more than 40 years from Connecticut, a choice prompted by what the company considers an inhospitable climate for business in the state. The company has been weighing overtures from other states including NY and Georgia that are eager to lure the $150 billion firm, reports The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 11, 2105).

GE’s considerations expand beyond local issues and tax rates. It is looking at the voting records of each state’s lawmakers on national policy issues, such as the fight to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. The company considers the bank vital to its exports of heavy machinery. GE never even considered a bid by Cincinnati—where GE is currently shifting hundreds of back-office jobs, and which is also the hometown of CEO Jeff Immelt—because of opposition from some Ohio politicians to reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank. The same holds true for Dallas.

The company was considering various factors in deciding whether and where to move its head office from Fairfield, where it has been since 1974. GE isn’t approaching the decision lightly. Relocating is “the kind of thing you only think about every 40 years, so you want to make sure you get it right,” said Immelt. Most of GE’s facilities to manufacture heavy equipment like power turbines, jet engines and locomotives are in other states such as South Carolina, Ohio and Texas. GE currently employs 4,900 people in Connecticut, of which 800 work at the corporate headquarters in Fairfield. One of the changes in the Connecticut budget that GE took issue with was a cap on the amount of prior-year tax losses companies could use to offset their taxes. Connecticut officials say the state will make efforts to keep GE at the “right price.”

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is this such a critical decision?
Why did Boeing move its corporate HQ a few years ago from Washington State to Chicago?

OM in the News: A Restaurant Without Servers, Registers or Visible Cooks

Eatsa is aiming for a more efficient and less expensive experience like the automats found in Japan and Europe (and like the old Horn & Hardart automats in NYC, which closed in 1991).

There’s a new quinoa restaurant in San Francisco, one where customers order, pay and receive their food and never interact with a person, writes The New York Times (Sept. 9, 2015). The restaurant, Eatsa, the first outlet in a company with national ambitions, is almost fully automated. There are no waiters or even an order taker behind a counter. There is no counter. There are unseen people helping to prepare the food, but there are plans to fully automate that process, too, if it can be done less expensively than employing people. Whether a restaurant that employs few people is good for the economy is another question. Restaurants have traditionally been a place where low-skilled workers can find employment.

Automation is transforming every industry. Business owners look to substitute machines for human labor. It happened to blue-collar workers in factories and white-collar workers in banks and even law firms. With self-driving vehicles, it may happen in the taxi and trucking industries. Robots are expected to transform health care. Automation is already part of many restaurants. Reservations are made online, orders arrive at the kitchen electronically, and bills are paid with a swipe on an iPad. Chains like Chili’s use tablet computers for ordering and paying, to speed the process and cut personnel costs.

Eatsa is one more example of how rapidly machines have moved beyond routine jobs like clerical and manufacturing work to knowledge jobs and service jobs — like waiting tables. “The objective is over time we want to automate more and more to increase speed and reduce cost, so we create a food product that’s much cheaper and also happens to be healthy,” said the founder. “By not hiring people to work in the front of the restaurant,” he said, “they save money on payroll and real estate.”

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Eatsa‘s approach?
What technologies do other restaurants use already?

OM in the News: A Stopwatch in the Operating Room?

Most businesses know the cost of everything that goes into producing what they sell — essential information for setting prices. “Medicine is different. Hospitals know what they are paid by insurers, but it bears little relationship to their costs”, writes The New York Times (Sept. 8, 2015). Now, thanks to a University of Utah project, its hospital is getting answers, information that is not only saving money but also improving care. The cost issue has taken on new urgency as the U.S. accelerates the move away from fee-for-service medicine and toward a system where hospitals will get one payment for the entire course of a treatment, like hospitalization for pneumonia.

The linchpin of Utah effort is a computer program with 200 million rows of costs for items like drugs, medical devices, a doctor’s time in the operating room and each member of the staff’s time. The hospital has been able to calculate, for instance, the cost per minute in the emergency room (82 cents), the surgical intensive care unit ($1.43), and the operating room for an orthopedic surgery case ($12). With such information, as well as data on the cost of labor, supplies and labs, the hospital has pared excess expenses and revised numerous practices for more efficient care. Harvard’s Michael Porter called the accomplishments “epic progress.”

The hospital began by looking at how much supplies cost — bandages, sutures, medications. Then it started tracing use of those items to individual patients. It added in labor costs, a more complicated question. Porter told the hospital to go into rooms with a stopwatch and time how long each staff member spends on each procedure and with each patient.

With its software, the hospital is also finding simple ways to improve outcomes and reduce costs. When doctors looked at their costs per day, they were stunned to see how much they were spending on lab tests. Each was cheap, $10-$20, but the total bill came to about $2 million a year. It turned out that 20-50% of lab tests were completely unnecessary, ordered by residents with no questions asked.

Classroom discussion questions:

How can stopwatch studies be used in hospitals?
Why is it so difficult to control costs in hospitals?

OM in the News: Manufacturing Capacity Can’t Be Turned Off and On Easily

A typical high-rise office building can require 100's of thousands of square feet of metal-framed glass panels — A typical high-rise office building can require 100’s of thousands of square feet of metal-framed glass panels

A shortage of glass is taking a toll on the nation’s commercial building boom, adding millions of dollars to the cost of new skyscrapers and halting some projects midway through construction, reports The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 8, 2015). Demand is soaring for the metal-framed glass panels, or curtain wall, used to sheath skyscrapers. Those buildings need a lot of glass. But glass manufacturers and fabricators can’t keep up. Many mothballed their operations or went out of business during the 2008 recession, which hit the construction industry hard.

Now, however, apartment buildings and office towers are sprouting up at their briskest pace in decades. Restarting idled glass factories is a costly and time-consuming process, a perfect example of capacity planning in Supplement 7. In the meantime, curtain-wall prices, which have risen more than 30% in the past 18 months, are setting records. Glass accounts for 1/4 of a construction project’s budget, so the extra expense can add tens of millions of dollars to a building’s cost.

The glass that ends up on the outside of an office building is manufactured in giant tanks in which sand is melted at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Long ribbons of raw glass are floated down a river of molten metal. This “float glass” is then cut into pieces, customized to order, and the panels are sent to contractors who fit them into metal frames to produce panels that meet the builder’s specifications.

Producers shut 11 out of 47 float-glass manufacturing plants in North America between 2007 and 2014. Building a new plant can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and restarting an idled line can take months because workers have to jackhammer thousands of pounds of hardened glass to remove it from melting tanks. “Once you take one of those tanks out of commission, you can’t just turn it back on,” said a PPG exec.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is the lead time so long in adding glass capacity?
Which of the tactics for matching capacity to demand (See Supp. 7, p. 302) apply in this situation?

OM in the News: Wal-Mart Tries to Skill Up

Until recently, very few retailers bothered to train entry-level service workers

Wal-Mart, famous for keeping costs down (including employee-related costs), is testing a new approach: investing in workers through higher wages and training, on the theory that this will pay off all around—for customers, the company and employees. The firm plans to roll out the new training program to all of its 4,500 U.S. stores by early 2016. And by then, Wal-Mart hires will earn at least $10 an hour.

Wal-Mart isn’t alone in its new focus on training front-line workers, reports The Wall Street Journal (Sept.5-6, 2015). The trend, known as “upskilling,” is rippling across the retail and service industries. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Gap, CVS Health, Kaiser Permanente, and UPS are moving in the same direction. It’s a big change, even for companies with a reputation for taking care of employees. Many firms train college-educated workers and managers, but few focus on front-line workers.

Employee turnover costs money— $5,000 per front-line worker, or 20-30% of an entry-level salary. Standard turnover in retail is 50% in the first 6 months. If Wal-Mart can reduce this churn, persuading people to stay at least 12-18 months, it will save tens of millions of dollars a year. Wal-Mart also hopes that the new training will result in better customer service and happier shoppers.

Front-line employees—cashiers, cart pushers and sales associates—will now spend their first months in a supervised on-the-job training program. In the past, they sat through a few days of orientation and safety drills. The only real job training happened in the store—knowledge passed on by more experienced employees. The new program, called “Pathways,” delivers instruction in gamelike computer modules—each just 2-3-minutes long. New employees spend their first six months practicing what they’ve learned from the games and drills, watched over closely by managers and preparing for a “gateway” assessment that can earn them a dollar-an-hour raise and sometimes more.

Classroom discussion questions:

What are the advantages of these training programs?
Why has it taken so long to see such changes?

Good OM Reading: Sustainable Supply Chains

Climate change is once again rising up the global agenda. Physical climate, and regulatory and consumer preference changes expose supply chains to growing levels of climate risk. This new 21 page report, called Supply Chain Sustainability Revealed, by Accenture, discusses threats and opportunities for companies at the top of supply chains. Findings include: (1) High levels of climate risk in key supply chains, and inadequate supplier response; (2) Supply chains in the US, China, and India are considered ‘vulnerable’; (3) Suppliers in India and Canada are not doing enough to manage climate change risks; (4) Suppliers in Brazil have done the least to manage climate exposures and recent water shortages; and (5) Suppliers who demonstrate a high propensity to collaborate with supply chain partners to reduce climate risk and, and who invest in emission reduction initiatives, deliver the greatest ROI.

The report also shows an increasing level of climate risk management within supply chains, which in turn is generating better climate risk outcomes. Water risk remains a concern – despite its potential for shocks – with 45% of exposed companies surveyed not carrying out a water-risk assessment.

The report states that the onus for changing lies with the customers, the large multinational companies like Wal-Mart whose procurement spending drives the global economy. Accenture writes: “Leading companies already understand their ability to drive change among their suppliers. It is incumbent upon more of their peers to require that their suppliers measure and disclose their carbon footprint, and work with their suppliers to find and, if necessary, incentivize emission reduction initiatives.”

Suppliers, meanwhile, should recognize that it is in their own interest to embrace more sustainable modes of operation. Not only do these offer a means to reduce costs by driving efficiency in resource use, but sustainability is likely to become a key differentiator in the marketplace. The report also urges policymakers must acknowledge their responsibility, and provide regulatory support to encourage companies.

Teaching Tip: The 8 Minute OM Lecture

For decades, I taught operations management at Rollins College in classes that met once a week–in 3 hour time blocks for full time students, 4 hour classes for EMBAs. Yet numerous studies have demonstrated that students retain little of our OM lectures, with research on determining the “average attention span” congregating around 8-10 minutes (see Attention Span Statistics, 2015 or BBC, 2010). So maybe it is time to try a new approach, the 8-minute lecture, advocated in Faculty Focus (Aug. 31, 2015).

How to implement the 8-minute lecture
1. Prepare students – Explain your teaching methodology and your rationale for doing things a certain way. This helps manage students’ expectations. Many of our business students expect to mostly listen to lectures and take notes. They are less accustomed to an active learning environment that involves debates on readings (which this blog’s OM in the News articles provide for you to share with your class), small group discussions and report-backs, quick multiple choice clicker quizzes, problem sets, and short lectures.

2. Redesign/rewrite lectures – Review your lectures to identify natural breaks. Where can you pause without losing meaning? How can you use students’ knowledge from their homework and previous learning as a scaffold? For example, when covering Location Analysis (Chapter 8), your 1st lecture might be on global location decisions, 2nd on 1-2 quantitative measures, 3rd on service strategies, etc.

3. Look for areas in your lecture that instead can be learned from an image, video (there are 35 free 6-12 minute videos we have created to accompany the text), or interactive activity, and substitute accordingly. Cull through the content until you have eliminated 2/3 of your lecture material.

4. Once this topic is fully explored, give another 8-minute lecture, and then engage students in a new activity that teaches the next learning objective. At the end of class, test to ensure that the objectives had been met by asking students for a 2-to-3-sentence note card summarizing their learning.

Hopefully, the success of this method of interspersing mini-lectures with activities, discussions, and time for reflection will be validated by students’ final exam scores.