Prof. Howard Weiss, recently retired from Temple U., developed both of these software packages for our texts.
To continuously improve the Heizer/Render/Munson free software packages that accompany their texts, I have added a feature to POM and Excel OM that lets students load files for over 160 examples and Solved Problems.
For either software package, on a PC, the examples can be accessed directly by using the Examples tool on the toolbar and are organized by chapter as displayed in the two figures below. On a Mac, the student will have to open the specific Chapter using Excel’s File, Open command.
In POM a window will appear showing the available examples and Solved Problems for that particular chapter. The window for the Short-Term Scheduling chapter is shown here. (Examples may use more than one POM module as is the case in Ch.15). In POM, there is one example per file. The list here represents 8 different POM files.
In Excel, the examples for a single chapter all appear in one Excel file (see below for Ch. 1) where you can see 3 spreadsheet tabs for 3 different problems.
For many examples an explanation is given. This appears above the data in both packages and can be seen in the figure for Excel OM.
The name of the module (and submodel) are given for all files so that the student can readily understand which model was used to solve the problem. In Excel, the name is in row 3 and in POM the name is in the left of the status bar at the bottom of the window.
By easily accessing the examples the student can gain a better understanding and more easily identify the model for all problems.