Guest Posts – Page 14 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Guest Post: Ready to FLIP Your OM Class?

Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Barbi Honeycutt, who is a professor at North Carolina State University. An expert in flipped classes, her email is: barbi@flipitconsulting.com

FLIP means Focus on your Learners by Involving them in the Process. In this model, pre-class work focuses on the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and the in-class work focuses on its higher levels. We want to integrate active learning strategies to involve learners in the process of applying, analyzing, and creating knowledge during class time. Students work through foundational material prior to class so the time spent in class becomes more valuable as they explore higher levels of analysis.

What do we mean when we say we want students to be prepared? In the flipped classroom, it’s critical for you to clarify exactly what being prepared means and what the expectations are. For example, if you assign a chapter for your students to “read before class” or tell them to “come to class prepared to discuss the chapter,” can you be more specific? What information will be used during class time? How will it be used? Also, many instructors use video in their flipped classrooms. The same questions apply. It’s not enough to say “watch the Heizer/Render video on Layout at Arnold Palmer Hospital” and expect students to magically know what to look for. What do you want students to do after watching the video?

Once you clarify what you want students to actually DO prior to class, then what? Here are 2 strategies you can integrate into your flipped class. (1) Ticket to enter: If you asked students to complete a task as part of their pre-class work, make sure it’s something they can bring with them and use as a “ticket” to enter class that day. For example, ask students to write 3 questions they have from the video. As they enter the classroom, ask them to hand in their ticket to enter class. (2) Pass-the-problem cheat sheet: If you have several problems or cases you want students to solve or analyze, try the Pass the Problem strategy. To prepare for this activity, ask students to come to class with a one-page “cheat sheet,” which will be the only resource they can use to solve the problem. Using the cheat sheet in this way also allows students to collaborate and develop sheets as a group.

Guest Post: The First Day of Class

Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Betty Anne Buirs, a professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia.

The old expression that you never have a second chance to make a first impression is certainly true in the classroom. I have tried several first-day-of-class strategies, ranging from briefly introducing the course and dismissing students early to spending the entire time reviewing policies and procedures. But students are never more attentive than they are on the first day of class, when they’re eager to determine what kind of professor they’re dealing with.

I make a point to be the first one to arrive and then personally greet the students as soon as they choose their seats. Instead of standing at the front of the room and calling their names, I introduce myself and ask them to tell me who they are. This also gives me a chance to ask students their nicknames as I add them to my seating chart, conveying that I am not merely taking attendance but am planning to converse with them. As I work my way through the class, I inevitably end up chatting with students, which helps put everyone at ease.

After I’ve greeted the students, I provide them with two handouts that reinforce the impressions they are forming about me and the course. The first is the course outline, which defines the course objectives, assignments, and schedule. The second describes my teaching philosophy, provides a rationale for every component of the course, and contains practical information, such as what to do if they miss a quiz.

Now I’m ready to begin the day’s lesson. I begin by writing 10 words on the board, my carefully chosen “Top 10 in 10” list, which we cover in 10 minutes. I use this opportunity to convey to my students that I genuinely love my job. I then tell them that instead of merely talking about the course, we’re going to actually dive into the material and that they’ll be actively refining their skills in every class.

Guest Post: Two Active Learning Approaches When Teaching Large OM Classes

Our Guest Post today comes from Chuck Munson, Professor of Operations Management at the Washington State University. Chuck joins us as coauthor of our new text editions, due out Jan. 1st.

Despite a call for more active learning and engagement in the classroom by the education community, many instructors believe that to be an impossibility in large classes. Here are a two activities that have worked for me.

E-Counting Game Pass out an excerpt of the Heizer/Render text containing about 400 words. Offer $20 to the first person who calls out the exact number of times the letter “e” appears and $1 to anybody else matching the correct response after that. Students can only respond once. I always keep my lunch money—students miss about 10-25% of the e’s the first time through. (You can verify the number of e’s by using the Find function in Word.) A histogram of their responses (automatically generated via Excel) shows how horrible the group would be as professional inspectors and the fallacy of 100% human inspection. Automated inspection or acceptance sampling is much better in practice.

Group Opinion/Strategy Either provide a topic with many possible strategies (e.g., how to implement JIT production when suppliers are located overseas) or present some sort of problem/game whose outcome can quickly be evaluated via computer after knowing student choices (e.g., best number of servers in a queuing problem). Split the class up into groups of five students each. Give them 10 minutes to discuss. There are various ways to report results: (1) all groups can report, (2) a subset of groups can report, or (3) all groups can turn in write-ups of their decisions. In any case, this is one activity where nearly all students will have participated in class because they’ll talk to a small group of peers much more readily than they’ll talk in front of 100 people. If you’ve had success with other activities in large classes, we’d love to hear about them!

Guest Post: Comparing Blended vs. On-Line OM Classes at St. Petersburg College

Our Guest Post comes from Wende Huehn-Brown, who is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College in Florida.

Last year I shared some of my experiences and efforts to increase student success in online courses for operations management at Jay and Barry’s OM Blog. At my college, we define student success as the portion of students earning a C or better as their final grade. Here are the past 3 years of data:

Modality	Spring 2013	Spring 2014	Spring 2015
Online	57%	73%	78%
Blended	92%	88%	75%

Overall we have sustained further improvements in online student success. The same pencasts have been used (see example in this 2013 Guest Post) since Spring 2014 (unfortunately my smartpen died, but I just obtained a new one to work on adding pencasts). Several updates have occurred in the screen captured videos. These improvements added and updated some problems, but more importantly were uploaded to YouTube so students can access from mobile devices and all videos were closed captioned to be ADA compliant.

While blended student success rates remain strong, we have seen a decrease. Basically, more students are attempting online classes, then moving to blended courses if unsuccessful online. Enrollment has actually grown almost 50% over this three year time period (the college doubled the number of sections offered both online and blended). Some weaker students appear to be recognizing their learning need to take tougher quantitative business classes in a blended format. Yet other students find recorded learning objects an effective supplement to the textbook and MyOMLab to further support online learning. Pencasts and videos were only used in a tailored study plan. Students are expected to practice in the study plan first and then critically think further about applying the analytical methods in other graded homework, quizzes or exams, or projects (which do not have these recorded resources).

Guest Post: Amazon vs. The New York Times

Our Guest Post today comes from Lawrence M. Miller, at http://www.ManagementMeditations.com

Last week the New York Times published an important article on Amazon and its very competitive, demanding culture. (Jay and Barry’s OM Blog summarized the issue on August 18th). I think the Times piece and the response to it from Jeff Bezos are important reading. Here is my take:

Amazon has grown in the highly competitive Internet and technology environment and is daily competing to bring new products and services to market. They have succeeded so far because of the intensity of their culture. They have been in the conquering “barbarian” stage of expansion and they are deliberately trying to hold on to that culture beyond the point at which it normally drifts into a more stable and comfortable state. Culturally, it is still a start up! And start-ups, fighting for their lives and to grab a piece of market territory that they can call their own, live at a level of intensity that makes many extremely uncomfortable. They are at war!

My guess is that Amazon is straddling the Barbarian and Builder/Explorer stage of my life cycle model. This is a good place to be in an external environment that is filled with rapidly emerging competitors and changing technologies. If you aren’t conquering you are probably about to be conquered!

Managing the culture of a company is like tuning a stringed instrument: over tighten and it makes a squealing sound; under tighten and it sounds dead. What is too much pressure for one person is not for another. If a company wants to grow, it needs to maintain that “creative dissatisfaction” that drives employees to innovate and perform at a high level. On the other hand, it wants a culture that does not drive away the most creative and capable. Amazon could not have succeeded as it has if its culture was driving away its most talented. It can’t be that bad!

Guest Post: Quantity Discounts are Everywhere

Today’s Guest Post comes from Prof. Chuck Munson, at Washington State University. Jay and I are pleased that Chuck is joining us as co-author on the new edition of our texts, coming out in January, 2016.

We can’t walk down most any aisle of the local grocery store without seeing multiple package sizes for products with (quite often) a quantity discount in the form of a lower price per unit for purchasing the larger size. Companies experience the same thing. Firms responding to a recent survey reported a large level of quantity discount pricing in business-to-business transactions, and 67% of respondents negotiate more than half of their prices.

Some of the most common operations reasons for the existence of quantity discounts include: (1) to receive cost savings due to economies of scale, (2) to increase order size and decrease order frequency, (3) to take advantage of truckload rates and transportation discounts, and (4) to be able to ship in standard package and container sizes. Quantity discounts are used for marketing purposes as well, including: (1) to increase annual demand, (2) to lock in customers for the long term, and (3) to win large orders from business customers.

If you’ve ever taught the EOQ model with quantity discounts (Ch. 12 in the text) in your OM class, your students may be like mine. For some reason, many seem to have difficulty grasping the solution technique. Rather than give up, though, I keep teaching it because quantity discounts are so prevalent in industry. Apparently, proper ordering techniques are not yet widespread in practice. Thirty percent of sellers and buyers in the recent survey claimed to base discounts and order quantities on intuition rather than on models and algorithms. Further, 1/4 of the buyers often order at a price breakpoint of incremental quantity discount schedules, which is never optimal. Clearly, companies are leaving a significant amount of dollars on the table.

For more details and a literature review of more than 250 papers on quantity discounts, see: www.cbe.wsu.edu/~cmunson/Research%20Papers/Quantity%20Discounts%20TOM-041.pdf

Guest Post: My North Carolina View of Incentives

Our Guest Post today comes from Coleman Rich, at Elon University, in North Carolina. Coleman is Chair of the Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship and Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management

Being a Textile Management grad from North Carolina State U., I have seen that incentives played an important role in NC to secure the textile trades from the North. Many towns would pool their money to help secure a mill which would move individuals closer to town and give workers a steady wage. The mills provided housing and staples for their employees.

Fast forward to 2 decades ago. North Carolina was in the running for the Mercedes plant. The Governor met with the Mercedes representatives at Alamance Community College near I-40/85 to discuss incentives for the plant. There was a 1,000 acre site with rail, and Duke Energy would run the power to the plant. The Governor offered over $100 million. But the Germans went to Alabama. We can only imagine how different this area would be if Mercedes had chosen this site.

That one plant created an entire industry cluster in the Alabama and Mississippi area. Since Mercedes announced the Alabama plant in 1993, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai

Dell's 2012 closing of this manufacturing plant put more than 900 people out of work. — Dell’s 2012 closing of this manufacturing plant put more than 900 people out of work.

and Kia also opened factories in that region. I believe incentives rarely work, but you have to “pay to play.” As a state, I would be willing to offer incentives to a large manufacturing company because I believe there is more economic value in supply chain companies locating in close proximity to the manufacturer. Alabama’s network of auto suppliers now tops 130 companies.

Here is a mistake the State made with Dell in Kernersville, NC. Virginia and NC were both bidding for the Dell plant. Virginia offered incentives in the $30-37 million range. Local and state incentives from NC were about $242 million. But the Dell plant closed after 5 years. Why did NC offer more than Virginia in incentives for the Dell plant? After all, as technology was changing and consumers moving toward laptops, this plant was making desktops. Also Dell began to change its business model to compete with HP. Maybe the economic models that the state of NC uses also need to consider product life cycle of the product that will be made in the plant.

But if it wasn’t for incentives, NC would not have been shaped by the tobacco, energy (Duke Power), furniture and textile industries. Those industries could have moved further south to SC and Georgia. As I teach Chapter 8 in the Heizer/Render text, I share all of these points with my class.

Guest Post: Teaching OM With Mobile Technologies at the U. of Dayton

Dr. Lance Chen, Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton Business School, shares his experience in striving for teaching excellence with mobile technologies.

At University of Dayton, high quality teaching is a foremost performance measure for each faculty member. I teach an introductory OM course, with Jay and Barry’s 11th edition. (Click here to see my U. Dayton Syllabus). We cover 14 Chapters with 25 meetings. To deliver a lecture with clarity with such a limited amount of time, I adopt mobile technology because mobile devices are highly accessible to nearly all the students and the time can be very flexible.

I have thus far created 50 YouTube videos ranging from 2 to 20 minutes to show the re-do of selected book examples and sample homework problems. There are 2 reasons for this: (1) I realize that the course presentation may create some learning gaps between the lecture and the homework problems. These gaps can be fixed by practicing more live examples; and (2) the textbook examples are largely about manual calculations with great detail. However, the learning objective of this course is to let most students stay focused on big picture of OM. Thus, the goal of these video clips is to stimulate student learning activities and to establish the linkage between course contents and practice.

Students love it! More than 80% of students watch all the videos and they seem to be motivated. The peak number of visits happens from 8-11pm. In my opinion, the reason the videos are so popular is that homework seems to be a set of real-world examples and greatly valued in practice. Furthermore, their interactions provide great stimulation. In addition to the active Q&A exchanges during lectures, more students show up during office hours, often with comments on how much they value the videos.

Regardless of their nice words, there are many things that need to be done. First, I try to make every video less than 7 minutes because lengthy videos, just like hour-long presentations, lose students’ attention quickly. Second, I need to add tags with brief description on each video clip that students can use to quickly identify the learning objective.

To me, teaching future executives is not only an honorable profession, but also a creative activity– just like research. I really enjoy it!

Guest Post: Using MyOMLab at Canisius College Increases Learning

Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Lynn A. Fish, who is Professor of Management at Canisius College

About a year ago, I ran a study for graduate student performance, using MyOMLab using the Heizer/Render text. The study reviewed the student’s performance using MyOMLab versus in-class. In the study, students completed their online homework, and then completed similar questions in-class on quizzes and tests. I recently ran the same study using undergraduate students. Again, the results indicated that students really learn using MyOMLab! In fact, the correlations were even higher for the undergraduates than the graduates.

Undergraduates and graduates exhibited moderate learning when the MyOMLab to in-class questions are ‘scaffolded’. (Scaffolded questions give the logical questioning and development of the problem by the questions asked. That is, one question result is used in the next question analysis, and so on. Partially-open questions may include some scaffolding and some open-ended portion. Open questions are large, complex problems students develop without being given the logical questioning, essentially a ‘blank sheet of paper’). As the in-class questions become ‘more open,’ students do not perform as well in-class testing. (Open, computer-graded questions are not available in MyOMLab at this time.)

These studies were done before additional features – vignettes, stories and videos, were added last summer to MyOMLab. The new features may encourage deeper thinking not currently shown in the studies that I’ve conducted. Regardless, both studies indicate that using MyOMLab encourages students to try the problems and learn.

The study, which I recently presented at the DSI meeting in Tampa, shows MyOMLab works. In recent course offerings, I added additional questions to the dataset that mirror my philosophy and methods. In the future, I’ll be reviewing the student’s correlation between online and in-class for the newer MyOMLab features. For example, short readings and videos, which may offer a different level of learning, and testing in the online environment, are features – that to my knowledge – are not in other textbook’s software.

Guest Post: The Uberization of Trucking

Our Guest post today comes from Roseanne Stanzione, who is CEO of LaneHoney, the Marketplace for Trucks On Demand

Uber’s taxi service is cool, right? Moving dots on a map tell you the location of the nearest taxi. Hop in and off you go, without handling cash. And now venture investors have placed bets that the $60 billion truck brokerage industry of agents and phones can be disrupted with applications like Uber.

So what is the Uber magic anyway? Three things: 1) set up, 2) transact, 3) done. Uber is first and foremost a logistics application, one that eliminates transaction friction and makes better use of assets. The current truck shortage is the biggest real-time asset problem in America needing a smart, uncluttered answer. The current state of industry technology? Unfilterable bulletin boards, incomprehensible transportation management software that requires training to use, no price information and everyone drowning in paper. It is no wonder 30% of backhauls go empty.

Set-Up is about simplifiying and automating the complexity of a transaction and placing it behind the scenes so that the transaction is front and center. To do that you need great data and handling, standard processes and documents, and of course, real time location. Transact is the real Uber magic. It’s genius Uber Experience (UX) that places the complex stuff behind the scenes and makes it effortless for users to oft in and hit “go.” UX will be a brand new competency required of logistics professionals to compete going forward. Done is realtime location that means trace for mobile dispatch, time-stamped delivery and accrued detention, putting “fuel surcharges” (a catch-all for additional brokerage charges) on death notice. Better visiblilty means actionable data for enterprises, better margins, shorter miles, and the chance to be home for dinner.

Once all this Uber magic is in place, hard to do by the way, carriers get more offers, shippers get faster, cheaper shipments. That broker taking the most out of a transaction with an unknown spread fee becomes a relic.

Guest Post: Allocating Risks and Costs Between Shippers

Our guest post today comes from Dr. Andrew Stapleton, who is Professor of Supply Chain Management at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. This is a great follow up to our post on the shipping industry two days ago.

When buyers and sellers (i.e., shippers) transact to move goods in containers across the globe, the shippers must concern themselves with who will take the risk and cost of delivering those goods from the seller’s factory to the buyer’s door. Since the 1930’s conference on maritime and admiralty liability in The Hague, the carrier’s liability has been limited to $500 per container or “package.” So if the carrier loses your container overboard in a storm (i.e., flotsam), or purposefully jettisons your container (i.e., jetsam) to save other assets, that carrier simply owes the shipper $500. Who covers the remainder of the value?

That is where INCOTERMS come in. INCOTERMS are a set of 11 shipping terms that clearly outline the rights, duties, obligations, and responsibilities of both buyers and sellers in transportation. FAS (Free Alongside Ship), FOB (Free On Board), CFR (Cost and Freight paid), and CIF (Cost, Insurance, Freight paid) are INCOTERMS to be used for water transport. EXW (Ex Works), FCA (Free Carrier), CPT (Carriage Paid To), CIP (Carriage, Insurance Paid to), DAP (Delivered At buyer’s named Place), DAT (Delivered At buyer’s named Terminal), and DDP (Delivery Duty Paid) are INCOTERMS for use in any mode or modes of transport.

The most commonly used INCOTERM is FOB, but this is also the most often misused term. Under Free on Board, the seller is free of obligation once the goods are on board the departing vessel at the port of export. The vast majority of shippers continues to use/misuse FOB, creating a “risk gap” and leaving themselves vulnerable. Ex Works represents the most obligation to the buyer and the least obligation to the seller. Firms such as Wal Mart and John Deere prefer transacting under EXW because it allows their supply chains the greatest visibility and control. For instance, under FOB, the inland Chinese supplier has the option of designating any land carrier to move the goods to the port, often leading to unnecessary surcharges and questionable kickbacks. EXW eliminates this opportunity.

Guest Post: Teaching Operations Management On-line at St. Petersburg College

Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Business at St. Petersburg College in Florida

Last year I was a guest on Jay and Barry’s OM Blog who shared some tips from my experiences teaching operations management from the Heizer/Render text in on-line courses. Now, a year later, I wanted follow up this discussion with further evidence on the value that pencasts (my Guest Post on January 12, 2013) and screen captured videos (my Guest Post on July 2, 2013) had on student success rates.

To emphasize the impact that these visual and recorded methods had on my students, let me share my student success rates this year in comparison with last year. Student successes are defined here as the portion of students earning a C or better as their final grade. Please understand as you consider these percentages, I do have a fairly large withdrawal rate in online courses and students that withdraw are in the denominator.

Modality	Spring 2013	Spring 2014
Online	56.5%	73.1%
Blended	92.0%	88.0%

Obviously, the value of physical meetings to explain concepts and demonstrate the analytics in the active learning activities I do in blended classes is very vital to student success. However, technology today does enable us to replicate some aspects from the classroom. Since 2013, my use of these recorded media options in my Operations Management course has grown to a total well over 100 pencasts and videos. I am able to reuse these across courses and I focus on study plan problems that are not used on further graded homework, quizzes, or exams. At the same time, student evaluations have become more positive on the course.

Guest Post: Total Team Collaborative Learning of OM in Spain

Our Guest Post comes from Phillip Flamm, who teaches OM in the ISQS Department at Texas Tech University

I have recently returned from teaching operations management this past summer in Texas Tech’s Study Abroad Program in Spain. I divided my 24 students into 8 teams of 3 each with these provisos:

Each member of the team will get the same final grade for 80% of the class so they will be forced to help each other
Grades will be based on 2 exams (taken as a team), 2 or 3 team presentations, and a peer grade (from team members plus an attitude grade from me)
One presentation will be a tutorial of quantitative material
The second presentation will be the team solution of an OM case scenario

As part of the class, I also arranged tours of 2 manufacturing plants.

Students studying abroad normally want to talk about what they did and saw while traveling. The teams involved in Total Team Collaborative Learning only wanted to talk about how much they learned and how much they retained. The students truly enjoyed the OM class and the lowest group exam grade was 88/100. (I give the exact same tests during Fall and Spring back in Texas and the average is 64.) This seems to suggest that the teams learned faster, and retained more.

In the Summer Study Abroad 2014, we increased from 15 to 24 students over the prior year, with the final grades staying the same. We:

Utilized special power point pages with 3 slides per page, with lines for notes; teams reviewed notes together following lectures to clean up any questions they might have
Worked daily quizzes together for a team grade
Prepared quantitative teaching sessions 3 times during the month long class
Worked homework problems together for a team grade

Guest Post: A Tip on Teaching How to Convert Quarterly Trends to Annual Trends

Howard Weiss is Professor of Operations Management at Temple University. He has developed both POM for Windows and Excel OM for our text.

At the recent POMS conference I asked the audience: “If the quarterly trend is an increase of 100 units, then what is the annual trend?” The answer I received was, “It is so obviously 400 units year that this must be a trick question.” This is the same answer my students typically give when I ask the question.

Below is a spreadsheet displaying “perfect” data that starts at 10000 and increases at exactly 100 per quarter.

You can easily see that the annual increases are 1600 since each of the 4 quarters increases by 400 from year to year. Thus, the annual trend is 16 times the quarterly trend.

While the data above is contrived, the analysis holds for “real” data. The spreadsheet below shows the revenue at Coca-Cola (after all, the conference was in Atlanta) from 2008 to 2013.

The quarterly trend is an increase of 242 as shown in the graph, the annual trend using Excel’s SLOPE function is an increase of 3916 per year, and the ratio of the annual trend to the quarterly trend is just above 16 for this “real” data. Typically, I have my students use data from their own companies and more often than not, the ratio is near 16 for quarterly data or 144 for monthly data.

Other ideas on teaching forecasting can be found in “Let’s Put the Seasonality and Trend in Decomposition”, R. L. Nydick and H. J. Weiss.

Guest Post: My Semester with MyOMLab at U. Illinois-Chicago

Our guest post today comes from Prof. Matt Liotine in the Dept. of Information and Decision Sciences, University of Illinois-Chicago.

I teach OM using Jay and Barry’s book in my classes. My students use MyOMLab, which has numerous student and instructor on-line resources, including an e-book. The resources include the book’s end-of-chapter problems. I assign a subset as homework problems for my students to work on line. The problems are algorithmic, meaning that students can work on the same problem, but with different numeric values, thereby ensuring academic honesty. I give students 3 tries at a problem. During each try, MyOMLab tells a student whether their answer is correct and gives them hints for another try. If the student fails to get a correct answer after three tries, MyOMLab will present the student with the same problem but with new values. This process repeats until the student gets it right. Instructors can specify how many times the process can repeat. I set it at a high number, so I would expect every student to get 100%!

While instructors can create their own problems, I use the problems that are already available. I do, on occasion, edit problems to make the wording more understandable to foreign students. MyOMLab also has an “Ask My Instructor” feature, which allows students to email their instructor with questions while working on a problem and enable the instructor to actually see the problem they are working on. Many of my students take advantage of this feature.

Blackboard is our UI-C learning environment. Since MyOMLab does not have algorithmic versions of the book’s multiple choice test items, I create large pools of questions on Blackboard, using the book’s test items. Blackboard can randomize questions and answer choices, enabling many students to simultaneously take a test on line while ensuring academic honesty.

MyOMLab also serves as a virtual teaching assistant, automatically grading homework assignments. It can export grades into Blackboard via spreadsheet format. MyOMLab can be directly accessed from Blackboard without an additional sign-on, making it more convenient for students and instructors. I recommend that instructors encourage students to use the many resources available, including the multimedia videos and the tutoring sessions with Jay and Barry.