Teaching Tips – Page 14 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: Myomlab

The last two weeks have been rather full. First, it began with a surprisingly well-attended DSI meeting in San Diego. At DSI on Saturday we had an all day session on Technology in the Classroom Miniconference that included Amy Phelps (Duquesne) doing a show-and-tell of Mystatlab. Mystatlab is much like Myomlab so the presentation was also helpful to users and prospective users of Myomlab. Amy’s experience parallels mine. That is, if you are not using an algorithmic teaching supplement like Myomlab, you are not doing all you can for your students …..or for yourself. Myomlab improves student learning and teaching evaluations while giving you more time for lecture prep and research. Myomlab is a sure bet for being a better teacher.

By Sunday evening, it was time for Jessica Gilmore, PH’s Customer Experience Manager, and Anne Fahlgren, Senior Marketing Manager, to introduce faculty to Myomlab. Their Sunday presentation had the added bonus of wine and hors d’oeuvres compliments of Prentice-Hall. Anne knows pricing so she focuses on prospective users and Jessica aids implementation. Both would be delighted to schedule a time with you to demonstrate Myomlab. Anne’s email is Anne.Fahlgren@pearson.com) and Jessica’s is (Jessica.Gilmore@pearson.com).

After flying home and a brief Thanksgiving break, I got back to work on the Guided Solutions for problems in Myomlab. I finished a batch and submitted them Monday. I think you will like them. The Guided Solutions are step-by-step explanations of the related problem. They complement the text references and the Virtual Office Hour videos. And all are available with the click of a mouse.

The goal is to have a Guided Solution for each problem and we are almost there. We expect to have most of them coded and loaded for the spring semester.

Yours for great teaching!

Guest Post: Teaching Quality Control with Olive Garden Breadsticks

Here is a great Chapter 6 teaching tip that is sure to make you popular with students – especially if you offer some extra credit. Send them on a “breadstick quality control” mission. A number of years ago, I helped the Olive Garden Restaurant chain solve an important problem. Their breadsticks were inconsistent. They were varying colors, sizes and shapes. The breadsticks are a signature item for Olive Garden, so management needed to define the extent of the problem, and to change the quality control.

I will not go into the whole process of solving the problem, but I will tell you that I began by visiting Olive Gardens and observing the breadsticks, even measuring them and recording variations in color and shape. There was no doubt about it, there was a striking inconsistency, indicating a quality control issue. After working with their bakeries, and finding a problem in the production chain, the restaurants once again had a delicious, high quality, consistant product.

Are the breadsticks at the Olive Gardens still consistent? Why not send teams of students to dinner and ask them to record their observations. With today’s technology, they can even take pictures of “problem breadsticks” and share them with the class. You can also discuss these 3 questions with the class:

Why are breadsticks such an important item in the Olive Gardens?
What are other examples of signature items in restaurants or other businesses?
Before you visit the restaurants to do a quality control survey, what equipment do you need, and what exactly will you be looking for?

Prof. Bill Quain currently teaches at Stockton College in NJ. He previously held endowed professorships at the U. of Central Florida and at Florida International U.

Teaching Tip: Queuing Up at Disney on Thanksgiving

Having lived in the Orlando area for over 2 decades, everyone assumes my family and I are regular visitors to the Magic Kingdom and the 5 other Disney World properties here. After all, Disney World is a powerhouse,with over 62,000 local employees (called “cast members”) and 48 million visitors last year. So when they find I have yet to take my 13 year old son to the Magic Kingdom, I appear to be some sort of ogre. (To my defense, my kids have been to Universal, Sea World, Wet n’ Wild, Blizzard Beach, Animal Kingdom, and on and on). To overcome this pressure, we all went to Disney today, Thanksgiving, 2010.

Here is what we learned. Thanksgiving is one of the busiest days of the year. And Disney has a clear plan for dealing with this capacity situation (Supp.7): All free passes are cancelled, all cast members are called in, extra parades are scheduled, more refreshment booths are opened, and hours are extended…the Park didn’t close till 1am!

But the queues–oh the queues! Where else would a rational family of 4 pay $340 in entrance fees, $12 to park, and $50 for water and ice cream, only to wait in a series of 45 minute lines for 5 or 6 rides and shows…and then walk away happy as can be?

Here is the secret to the psychology of queuing theory…something Disney’s flock of Ph.D.s in OR and IE have mastered: (1) Keep your customers informed of how long each queue will take,with signs posted frequently…and overestimate, don’t underestimate. (2) Entertain them while they wait, with videos, music, and cartoon characters. (3) Keep the lines moving so progress seems to be taking place. And (4), make people walk long distances between the most popular features, with plenty of interesting activities en route.

I hope this leads to some useful class discussions about how how queues can be managed. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Teaching Tip: Dealing With Cheating in Your OM Class

Today’s front pages headlines here in Orlando have centered on a sensitive topic, but one we must address nonetheless–cheating in our classes. The story concerns a B-School prof at U.of Central Florida (UCF), which is now the 2nd largest college in the US, with 56,000 students. This, of course, means large classes–often shown on closed circuit TV. In a class of 600 Strategic Management seniors, the instructor used a 300 question Test Bank (which he thought to be secure) to create the midterm of 55 multiple-choice questions. Unusually high grades led to 206 students admitting they had studied from the Test Bank.

Nationally, about 21% of students admit to cheating, with more problems on large campuses and in large lecture classes. As the DSI Meeting takes place at this moment in San Diego, maybe this is a good time to raise the issue.

Yes, Test Banks are more and more available on-line, despite threats and suits by publishers. Our own publisher has taken legal action against people using our copyright material. But some schools using our OM text actually buy copies of the Solutions Manual and Test Bank and sell them as study tools to their students. So it is a fair assumption that some “ambitious” students will try to get an edge gradewise by whatever tool is on the market.

Jay and I have discussed the problem many, many times and have tried to foolproof our system to this extent: (1) we have a massive Test Bank, with well over 2,000 questions, and a text with over 900 problems. This gives the ability to keep from repeating the same questions from semester to semester; and (2), we created MyOMLab with a goal of making it as integrity-driven as humanly possible. The key is the algorithmic nature of the on-line problems that come from the text. You can assign them “bookmatch” (ie, identical to text), or “algorithmic” (ie, where each student gets her own data).

Randomizing questions from large Test Banks, using new assignments each year, and MyOMLab are just 3 ways to deal with this visible issue. Please share your comments.

Guest Post: Trials and Tribulations of Teaching OM in Large Sections At Texas Tech

Teaching any subject in large sections (100 to 300 students) is difficult, but teaching operations management with heavy doses of quantitative/procedural type material presents a lot of unique challenges. In a large lecture hall students are farther away from the professor and as a result don’t feel comfortable asking questions and seem to be a bit less engaged than in smaller settings. The trick is to make the large room seem smaller and the lecture more interesting. Many may not want to admit this, but teaching in this setting requires more entertainment value to keep the students engaged.

Over the years I’ve used a combination of tactics that seem to be effective. Five minutes before class begins I play rock videos on the video screen with volume turned up to a high level. It energizes me and wakes up the students. When class starts I show a short funny video (1 minute or so) to help the students relax. As I lecture I move around a lot (back and forth and up and down the aisles) utilizing exaggerated arm/hand movements. I don’t use a microphone since I have a big voice, but I do talk louder than my normal speaking voice with more variation in speed of delivery and voice inflection. The idea is to make you seem larger and the room seem smaller.

During the lecture I sprinkle in operations management examples from my career with a little self-deprecating humor added. Some of the examples have definite entertainment value, but examples seem to foster understanding and I ask questions on exams based on those examples. I also utilize the Turning Technologies personal response system “clickers” (I’ll discuss my experience with PRS in the next blog). Use of the PRS system (in Power Point form) has three distinct advantages:

Refocuses the students’ attention (4 to 5 questions per lecture)
Allows for collaborative learning
Reinforces key points that may be exam questions (if students don’t get the correct answer I back track to bolster understanding).

PRS responses may also be utilized as an additional assessment tool for accreditation justification or for research purposes. In short, variation seems to keep students engaged and at a point where they can retain more.

Phillip Flamm is an Instructor in the Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences department of the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University

Teaching Tip: Global Trade, Deficits, and Logistics

If the trade deficit is a topic that arises in your OM class, a visual image of the Port of New York and New Jersey is worth 1,000 words. Fortune (Nov.15,2010,pp.14-15) discusses the “Container City” one passes in driving on the NJ Turnpike.

In the first 8 months of 2010, 70,000 more full cargo containers entered the Port than left it. In other terms, 45% of the containers exported from the Port are empty, a reflection of the US trade imbalance. Yet a 3rd statistic: 1.80 to 1 is the ratio of imports to exports, up from 1.75 to 1 last year.

Six of the world’s largest ports are now in China, up from two just a decade ago. The largest port in the US in the Port of Los Angeles, the world’s 16th biggest, down from 8th ranked a decade ago.

What all of this means, of course, is that we are running a huge trade deficit, of which the logistics imbalance is one surrogate measure. Who benefits? My cousin Bob is the only one I know. He ships scrap metal to China for recycling and pays only a fraction of the shipping charges he would if he were sending from China to the US.

Supplier and Risk Monitoring

A good way to help students gain insight into the significance of supply chain risks (Chapter 11 introduces the issue of supply chain risk) may be to reference the Dow Jones Supplier & Risk Monitor. This Dow Jones approach may help students see that mitigating supply chain risk is a significant issue in the real world. So much so that firms (in this case Dow Jones) sell the service. The DJ Supplier and Risk Monitor helps companies keep track of and evaluate events that may be critical to their supply chain. Dow Jones claims that they can identify potentially disruptive events, new products, product recalls, reputation problems, product safety issues, and other types of breaking news. Additionally, DJ believes they can help companies uncover potential problems by highlighting news stories by volume and relevancy. Also available are company performance and financials. The system can provide graphic displays of selected priorities, instant alerting, and emailing. The idea is to show students that commercial tools exist to expand risk scanning to all of the elements in the supply chain and potential partners. Monitoring the supply chain and evaluating risk is not just an academic exercise.

Guest Post: Supply Risk Hook – Why Kenya Can’t Stand Iceland!

Like Barry and Jay, I’m a great lover of hooks! A hook can be a little story, a movie clip, or a simple exercise. The key is that they’re short and memorable! Here’s a nice one concerning global supply chain risk that I use in my supply management lecture.

I take in a nice bunch of flowers and ask my students where they come from. In the case of Europe, the most likely origin is Kenya. Horticulture is Kenya’s biggest source of income with 1000 metric tons of produce shipped daily to Europe. (See the photo In Ch.11 of the Heizer/Render text). In fact, around 30% of all cut flowers sold in the EU are imported from Kenya.

I then discuss all the effort required to get these lovely flowers into our stores every day. Here you can mention the challenges of speed as a key performance objective, the perishability of stock, the extension of the supply chain etc. Then I ask (jokingly, of course!) why Kenya dislikes Iceland right now?! For the period earlier this year when the Icelandic volcano was grounding most flights throughout Europe, Kenya’s flower supply chain was shut down at a cost of approximately $3million per day. Flowers and other fresh produce had to be thrown away because there was no way of getting them to the market other than airfreight.

This story can be used demonstrate the nature of global supply networks and the risks they face from disruptions that are often well beyond their control. You can then get students to think of other factors that can cause disruptions to supply networks: Natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina or Pakistan floods for example); Geo-political challenges; trade disputes; etc.

This hook is of course particularly handy if you’re in Europe, because Kenya was so badly affected by the Icelandic volcano in a way that many flower suppliers in the USA weren’t. So, you could simply tell the story as if you were in Europe for that lecture… “So kids, imagine I’ve gone over to England to visit my Grandma and I’m taking her this bunch of flowers. Where do you think they came from?…” You get the idea! Happy teaching!

Prof. Alistair Brandon-Jones writes this guest post from the University of Bath, one of the top five business schools in the UK. Alistair has been active in developing myomlab.

Myomlab Enhancements

If you haven’t seen many posts from me in the past few weeks, it’s because I’ve been working on enhancements for myomlab. As you know from my previous post regarding myomlab software, I think myomlab is revolutionizing OM teaching and learning. For the instructors already using myomlab, I hope your classes are going well. We would love to hear from you with your observations and comments (you can click the Comments button below to publish them) or email me.

Some of the new features in myomlab are:

A greatly enhanced set of Guided Solutions to provide an improved tutorial experience for individual problems. The goal is to have a Guided Solution for each problem as well as a text reference. The Guided Solutions are being added as they are developed and evaluated for pedagogy and accuracy.
A ‘copy and paste’ option that we have been developing with Howard Weiss of Temple University facilitates transfer of data from myomlab problems to Howard’s Excel OM and POM for Windows as well as to Excel.
The ability to apply a penalty (deducting points or percentage) for assignments submitted late.
The ability to assign multiple prerequisites for assignments.
And a ‘custom question builder’ enabeling you to create and edit your own questions.

Teaching Tip: Teaching Inventory Modeling in the Real World

Our research shows that the most frequently covered topic in OM courses is Inventory Management (Ch.12). In that chapter, we do discuss the importance of record accuracy, cycle counting, and shrinkage. But what we do not discuss is the use of the numerous inventory models if inventory is only “partially observed”.

In today’s issue of Decision Line (Oct., 2010), an excellent article by Prof. Suresh Sethi, at U.Texas-Dallas, goes into the reasons for partial observation of inventory levels and then discusses how these impact modeling efforts. Here are 5 causes Suresh details:

1. Sales recorded wrong (eg, a clerk scans an item twice, when there were actually 2 different flavors of soup).

2. Misplaced inventory (eg, when items are stored dynamically, not in a fixed location). Suresh tells of a top retailer who discovered 16% of its items were misplaced.

3. Spoilage (eg, when customers tear open a package to look at the item inside, spill drinks on clothes, or scratch a car they test drive).

4. Product quality and yield (eg, when some items coming into the warehouse are unknowingly damaged).

5. Theft (eg, break-ins, employee pilferage, and customer shoplifting). The Limited, eg., recorded an inventory discrepancy of $142 million a few years ago—the equivalence of 21,000 ocean containers!

Suresh concludes, “By now it should be clear that the incomplete inventory information (i3) problem is quite common in practice, that policies in current use are neither optimal nor applicable”. He finishes the article by discussing 4 ways to classify i3 problems.

The real point worth making in class is that the models we discuss in Ch.12 depend on accurate record keeping, which may be impossible in a variety of real world companies.

Teaching Tip: Fun Class Exercise in Work Measurement (Ch.10)

I am always looking for a simple, fun exercise to break up class for a few minutes, and find that shuffling cards is perfect for Chapter 10’s topic of Time Studies.

The equations average observed time, normal time, and standard time are very straightforward (see Equations 10-1,10-2, and 10-3 in the text). But some bright students usually inquire as to where the Performance Rating needed in Equation 10-2 comes from. So I bring as many decks of playing cards as I can find to class that day.

Explaining that there are some tasks for which the Normal time is already known and established, I recompute the equation as Performance rating factor=Normal time/Average observed time. Then I bring out the decks of cards and group the students into teams that measure how fast each person can deal the deck into a very neat bridge hands (ie, 4 piles of 13 cards per pile). Each student repeats the task 2-3 times, while team members time her, then compute the average. Each person takes a turn being timed.

The Standard time for this task turns out to be 30 seconds , and I point out that the dealing activity resembles other production tasks involving manual dexterity. Each person’s Performance rating is then computed (30 sec./average time) and recorded by the team on the board next to that student’s name. Students have fun seeing who has the highest and lowest Performance ratings for this type of job skill.

Teaching Tip: Location, Location, Louisville?

We open Chapter 8, Location Strategies, with a Global Company Profile on why FedEx selected Memphis as its US superhub. But Fortune (Oct.18,2010) expands on this topic, with a feature called “Louisville Flies High”.

It turns out that Louisville has great geography, economic incentives, and high tech logistics that have attracted more than 100 corporations this past decade. The city is within a 2-hour flight to 75% of the US population and sits just 40 miles from the exact center of the continental US on a population density map. Its also one hour below the frost line.

The clear supply chain draw is UPS, whose $2 billion Worldport has 30,000 conveyors and can sort 416,000 packages per hour. Toshiba now trains UPS employees to fix computers on site–and return them within 48 hours. Zappos moved to Louisville to be near the giant UPS facility also. If a package leaves the online shoe retailer (which my wife adores) at 12:45am, UPS will deliver the shoes anywhere in the country the same day.

This makes for a nice discussion in both the Location and Supply Chain(Ch.11) chapters.

Teaching Tip: Why Do So Many Large Projects Overrun?

While most OM texts cover Project Management (see Chapter 3), there is little discussion as to where the time estimates for activities in PERT and CPM come from or how accurate they are. This question arises in, of all places, an easily overlooked article in The Wall Street Journal (Oct.16-17,2010).

Here we learn that “planners underestimate costs in nearly 9 out 0f 10 projects” and “cost overruns for building projects are typical”. From my decades of teaching MIS and working as a consultant in IT, I can add that completion times in software development projects are also regularly underestimated.

Why is this the case? Research, according to the WSJ, shows that “people allow their best hopes to dominate the planning process”. This case of “irrational optimism” suggests that project managers would do well to keep data from prior projects. “Looking forward makes you more optimistic”, says a Norwegian researcher in the article. “Looking backward makes you more realistic”.

So when you and your students are discussing large projects that suffered major overruns (like Boston’s “Big Dig” and others they will bring up), you may want to remind students that doing PERT charts and running MS Project is all well and good, as long as the inputs are meaningful.

Finally, did you ever wonder about the the empirical basis of PERT’s 3 time estimates and the use of the Beta distribution in project management? If large projects do consistantly underestimate activity times, should we be giving more weight in the PERT formula to the “pessimistic” time estimate, b? Perhaps the formula in Equation (3-6) in our text should be t=(1a+3m+2b)/6 instead of t=(1a+4m+1b)/6?

Teaching Tip: Helping Your Students Find Jobs

We all know the economy is still weak ( to put it mildly), and this means our students are in tough positions to find their first jobs. Where we stand in Florida, it seems as though the alligators are nipping at our economic feet. With a quarter of the economy here in Orlando driven by construction, you can buy a nice condo that sold for $160,000 in 2007 for $20k today!

So what can we do to help our OM students to be more competitive as they enter the job market? Since everyone graduating already has the same basic set of skills (eg., Excel, Powerpoints, etc.), how can OM add value? Here are 2 suggestions:

1.Project management is an interesting topic (Ch.3) that is certainly useful in so many jobs. We cover MS Project lightly towards the end of the chapter. But I am convinced that mastering MS Project can give a competitive edge. Last year, I provided all 75 of my students the chance to build their resumes by offering a 1-credit independent study course called “Using MS Project in Project Management”. All they had to do was find a project with at least 30 activities, and create a series of MS Project charts, along with a 1-page report. Our publisher’s reps at Pearson will provide you with as many free copies of the full-blown MS Project ( time limited) as you request. It includes an excellent Tutorial, which picks up where the text leaves off. Amazingly, 25 students signed up to build their transcripts/resumes. They produced some impressive reports and picked up a useful skill.

2. The 2nd hot button I like is to get a Six-Sigma Green Belt while in school. My colleague Jim Gilbert offers his TQM course every Fall semester. As an option, Jim arranges (at an extra lab fee of $900) for students to get certified as Green Belts. Over 30 students a year take this option and enter the workforce with a wonderful credential.

Guest Post: How We Use Software at Temple U.

Here is our 1st Guest Post. It comes from Prof. Howard Weiss at Temple U. As I mentioned in my Teaching Tip blog on 9/21, Howard has developed and maintains the software that accompanies our texts. He has been on the cutting edge of using computers to teach OM for over 2 decades.

Howard Weiss writes:

When I began using software in my OM class it was Lotus 123…remember that?! I would display the spreadsheets from the front of the classroom. But on their teaching evaluations, several students requested hands-on use of software rather than just watching me. I experimented by running half of each course in the classroom and half in the public computer lab. Recall that this was at the time when few students had PCs at home. The experiment was a success, and my departmental colleagues followed the half-time lab model. At the same time, in addition to public labs, teaching labs were being configured. Since then, roughly at the time when Windows and Excel began to become popular, all of our sections have been scheduled for half- time in the classroom and half-time in the teaching lab. We are a large school, so to make scheduling easier we have two sections of OM taught simultaneously. One section is in the classroom while the other is in the lab and vice-versa for the other lecture that week.

Changing to the alternating classroom/lab format meant a restructuring of the lectures. I try to lecture on qualitative material on the first day and then use the lab on the second day for the quantitative material rather than mixing the qualitative and quantitative material. My labs include exercises in Excel in order to build the students’ Excel skills, use of both POM for Windows and Excel OM so that the students can decide which they prefer, and use of the Active Models that accompany the Heizer/Render textbook.

Having developed POM for Windows and Excel OM, I spend a significant amount of my personal time continuously maintaining and improving these packages. I am always available to respond to any requests for help of any sort from you or your students. You can reach me at dsSoftware@prenhall.com.

If you would like to share your teaching experiences, please just email us and we will post your Guest Blog.