Teaching Tips – Page 6 – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: Our New Project Management Classroom Simulation

This Project Management Classroom Simulation is the 2nd of our new classroom gaming exercises. It accompanies Chapter 3, Project Management, and is free within our MyOMLab learning system.

Activity Brief

Select and manage subcontractors to achieve schedule and profitability goals of home-building project.

You are the general contractor for a high-end, private residence construction job. You manage teams of subcontractors who work on various aspects of the house, from plumbing and electrical to drywall and landscaping. The homeowners, Robert and Maggie Applebaum, want to be in their new house in 7 months and will check in with you regularly about its progress. It is your job to make sure daily operations at the site are running smoothly and that the house is completed on time and within budget, without negatively affecting your other building projects

Industry: Construction

Teaching Tip: Note Taking in Your OM Class

We are always looking for ideas on how to make your students successful in their study of OM. The “rotating note taker” concept comes from Faculty Focus. This student serves as the class note-taker, posting his or her notes on the course management system before the next class session. The notes are graded pass/fail and count for 1% of the final course grade. If it’s a fail, the student learns why and is assigned another day to take and post class notes.

Having a designated student taking and posting notes does not relieve other students of the responsibility to take their own notes. The posted notes serve as an alternative to the student’s own notes. They may clarify or emphasize a different part of a concept, add more detail, or offer a different perspective.

You can introduce the assignment on day one. Recruit a student familiar with the learning management system (LMS) to provide the first set of class notes. Put instructions about posting notes on the LMS, offer recommendations about attaching files, and suggest making references to the text instead of trying to reproduce complicated graphs. If your class is large, have two students taking and posting notes for each class session.

Here’s a list of benefits that accrue from the strategy.

Students report that they find the posted notes helpful when reviewing for tests. It’s an opportunity to compare what they have written with what someone else has in their notes.
If a student knows that everyone in the class is going to look at his or her notes and that the teacher is going to evaluate them, it motivates careful note-taking.
Students who aren’t good note-takers have the chance to see what a good set of notes looks like.
If students miss a class, they have access to a set of notes.
The strategy demonstrates your commitment to student note-taking.

Teaching Tip: Our New Forecasting Classroom Simulation

This Forecasting Classroom Simulation is the 1st of our new classroom gaming exercises. It accompanies Chapter 4, Forecasting, and is free within our MyOMLab learning system.

Activity Brief

As an operations consultant, you have just signed a 2 year contract to provide monthly forecasts of customer demand for a new gas station. The gas station will sell 3 types of gas: Regular, MidGrade, and Premium. The gas station will have a total of 8 pumps offering all three types.

The gas station will also have a modest convenient store with a standard selection of snacks, beverages, and other miscellaneous items. However, the ownership group believes the station will attract business primarily due to its prime location near a major highway. Pricing for gas will be comparable to alternatives in the area and will predominantly be driven by market conditions relating to the price of crude oil per barrel.

The ability to forecast the next month forecast is critical for the station’s inventory management and other business planning. It will be necessary to gather various sources of information and ultimately analyze data in order to make the best forecast for each of the 24 months of the contract.

Your performance will be based on the collective mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) among the three types of gas. If you are able to forecast at less than or equal to 5% MAPE, you will receive a $10,000 bonus for your work. If your forecast are between 5% and 20% MAPE, you will not receive the bonus, but you will secure the position and receive a contract renewal. If the MAPE exceeds 20%, you will not receive a contract renewal.

Learning Objectives

Understand and break down patterns of customer demand
Generate forecasting models based on judgement, causal, time-series methods, or seasonal methods
Evaluate the quality of a forecast model using error metrics (specifically mean absolute percentage error).
Help students understand the distinction between the “signal” and the “noise” (Students are encouraged to also read The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don’t. by Nate Silver). Many aspects of customer demand variation are explainable – the signal, but there needs to be an acceptance of unexplainable variation – the noise. In other words, students have to make a concession that their models will not predict customer demand with 100% accuracy.

Industry: Retail

Teaching Tip: Staying Balanced as You Prepare for the Fall Semester

I just read an interesting piece that is slightly outside our usual OM blog themes–but very worthwhile nonetheless. “It may be time,” writes Faculty Focus, “to identify some new strategies for self-care.” Here is a menu of ideas to help faculty design a balanced and productive work life:

Examine how you spend your time and energy: Which work-related tasks leave you feeling energized or excited? Which feel like unnecessary chores? Next year, prioritize activities that build you up or represent an important contribution to the field. Cultivate the art of saying “no.”
Rethink OM course design: Use creative course design strategies and tools to provide engaging experiences for students without taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. For example, use a simple audio recording tool to provide feedback instead of typing your comments. Vocaroo and VoiceThread make great options. Students appreciate the personal approach, and providing verbal feedback takes far less time than generating written comments.
Refine your daily workflow: Consider using a service that delivers e-mails a few times per day rather than trying to work through the persistent interruptions of new emails arriving in your inbox. Use an electronic “to do” list like Todoist or Wunderlist to organize reminders and deadlines. Use Google or Outlook calendar scheduling for reminders to take a daily walk, meditation, or a quick stretch.
Evaluate your food and fuel: Food can drag you down or prop you up. Step away from your desk periodically for a snack, and be sure to choose one that is nourishing as well as invigorating. Use your snack break to get outdoors or connect with your colleagues while you nourish yourself.

Self-care isn’t an all-or-nothing approach. Starting small is ideal. Pick one or two practices to implement tomorrow.

Guest Post: Campus Club Cupcakes – Classroom Course Icebreaker Exercise

Our Guest Post today comes from Brent Snider, who is an award winning senior instructor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business.

The first session of a required undergraduate OM course is often challenging for both faculty and students. Reviewing the course syllabus is mundane, and many students are unaware of what OM even is or why it is required.

Campus Club Cupcakes was developed specifically as a course icebreaker exercise to turn the first session into an in-class exercise that gets the entire class engaged and working together within minutes– while also conveying what OM is, its importance, and how it relates to other functional areas. Campus Club Cupcakes is a variation of the popular “Kristen’s Cookie Co.” case, incorporating supply chain management concerns. It consists of a 1-page mini-case and 5 related questions and is completely free. (E-mail me at brent.snider@haskayne.ucalgary.ca and I will send you the whole lesson plan).

The case scenario is based on a student club looking at alternatives to raise funds for their community development initiatives. The questions students are expected to work through are (1) how long would a student have to wait, (2) how many orders can be completed in a shift, (3) how many trays would be needed, (4) should a discount be offered, and (5) what are some of the risks. Cupcakes require a multi-stage process (baking, then toppings) which also enables discussion on supply chain management concepts of subcontracting and postponement.

Students work through the questions for 20–30 minutes followed by a debrief, all of which can be completed in either a 50-70 minute session. We have used Campus Club Cupcakes to kick-off the OM course for the past 2 years and students have overwhelmingly embraced it, with over 92% commenting positively about the exercise.

I am confident you too can turn the dreaded “day 1” into “day won” with this exercise!

Teaching Tip: How to Get Your OM Students to Participate More

What can we as teachers do to better promote student engagement? Here are a few ideas I extracted from Faculty Focus (June 29, 2016):

Redefine participation. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class.

Cultivate a presence that invites engagement. An engaging teaching presence is communicated by behaviors that convey confidence, comfort, anticipation, and great expectations. The classroom space, whether it’s physical or virtual, is one you share. Move about in it. See who’s in class. Smile, extend a greeting, or comment on one of our recent OM in the News blogs.

Talk about why learning is important. This is not the same old lecture about how OM is such a hard course. Most students haven’t yet fallen in love with learning. They think they like easy learning, memorizing bits of information, or getting by doing the bare minimum. Let yours be the class that introduces students to learning that captivates their attention, arouses their curiosity, stretches their minds, and makes them feel accomplished.

Give students a stake in the process. We make all the decisions about learning for students. We decide what students will learn, the pace, the conditions, and whether students have learned it. You can give students some control. Let them start making small decisions—what topics they want discussed in the exam review session, whether quizzes will count 10% or 20% of their grade, whether their final project is a paper or a presentation—and watch what happens to their engagement.

Use cumulative quizzes and exams. For long-term retention of course content, student exposure to the material needs to be ongoing. Every time they retrieve what they’ve learned, that material becomes easier to remember. Students would, of course, rather have unit exams. We can help students prepare for cumulative exams by scheduling regular quizzes (and MyOMLab is perfect for this).

Teaching Tip: Building a p-Chart Using Airline Frequent Flier Award Data

Today’s Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2016) has an article that you can turn into a teaching exercise, on a topic your students will all have opinions about, namely airline travel award redemption. Of the 25 airlines studied, the Journal found a wide discrepancy in ease of booking a coach seat using frequent flyer miles.

Best among the US carriers: Southwest, which had award seats available for 100% of queries, and Jet Blue, which offered seats 92.9% of the time. Among the worst US carriers: American, which did not have seats for 43.6% of requests.

The overall average of 76.6% (which was better than I expected) for the carriers shown can be used as the center line in a p-bar chart. Using Excel, Excel OM, or POM for Windows, your students can compute 3-sigma upper and lower limits and draw conclusions about which carriers are “out of control.”

This should lead to a nice discussion about service quality (Ch.6).

Teaching Tip: Five Ideas for Ending Your OM Semester

Its often been said that first and last class sessions are the bookends that hold a course together. Here are a few ideas from Faculty Focus (April 13, 2016) that might help us finish the semester with the same energy and focus we mustered for the first class.

Integrate the Content—Let the students bring it all together by integrating the major concepts, important ideas, and a few significant supporting details of the OM course. Perhaps they will follow the 10 operations decisions around which we build the text.

Review for the Final—Make the students do the work. Students are often at a loss when it comes to knowing how to study for comprehensive finals. Devote some time to working with them to develop a study game plan. What’s the best way to review notes?

Get and Give Useful Feedback—Although colleges have moved toward online course evaluations, use this last class to get and give a different sort of feedback. For example, create a list of every assignment students completed during the semester. Ask what you should stop, start, or continue doing. Or give students feedback on how you experienced the course. Share 5 things you’ll remember about this class and one thing about teaching you’ve learned from these students.

Bookend Activities—Tie the end to the beginning. Ask students what reasons justify making this a required class. (You don’t have to think they’re good reasons.)

Celebrate—It’s been a long semester. Get everybody walking around, talking, telling stories. Be part of the crowd. Shake hands; pose for selfies. Bring snacks or invite students to contribute snacks. This is a unique collection of individuals who will never again be together with you and the course content. End with applause and say “Thank you” if it’s a class that’s made you thankful.

Teaching Tip: Explaining NAFTA to Your Students

Making car mats in Mexico. NAFTA put U.S. automakers in competition with Mexican workers.

Your students have undoubtedly been hearing about Donald Trump’s threat to “break” the North American Free Trade Agreement. Auto industry workers offered up some of his loudest cheers. But there are still more than 800,000 jobs in the U.S. auto sector, and The New York Times (Mar. 30, 2016) makes the case that without NAFTA (see Chapter 2), there might not be much left of Detroit at all. To be sure, the deals to reduce trade barriers threaten the livelihood of workers in the industries exposed most directly to foreign competition. NAFTA put them in direct competition with Mexican workers earning 1/5 of their compensation.

The American trade deficit in autos and parts tripled in the 2 decades after the NAFTA deal took effect in 1994, to about $130 billion in 2013. The industry lost 350,000 jobs, 1/3 of its workers, a massive shift in a flagship industry. Still, NAFTA itself had a relatively modest impact on the size of the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico. And autoworkers in Detroit were not just competing with cheap workers in Mexico. They were also competing with American workers in the union-averse South, where many car companies set up shop. They were competing with robots and more efficient Japanese and Korean automakers.

The integration of production across countries with complementary labor forces — cheaper workers in Mexico to perform many basic tasks, with more highly paid and productive engineers and workers in the U.S. — turned out to play a central role in reviving our auto industry. The Honda CR-V assembled in Mexico, for example, uses a U.S.-made motor and transmission– and 70% of its content is either American or Canadian. This regional integration gave the U.S.-based auto industry a competitive edge that was critical to its survival. There was a concern 20 years ago that an auto industry supply chain would develop across Asia, including China and Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Now, as Chinese wages rise, almost every car manufacturer is setting up shop in Mexico.

Classroom discussion questions:

Explain the purpose of NAFTA.
Why is this an OM issue?

Guest Post: Teaching Cases in Your Undergraduate OM Class

Today’s Guest Post comes from Dr. Matt Drake, who is Associate Professor at the Duquesne U. School of Business.

Teaching cases have been a mainstay in the MBA classroom for decades. Cases possess several pedagogical benefits over the traditional lecture method: They do a good job simulating a complex decision environment, require students to separate relevant from irrelevant information, and require students to synthesize different concepts and analytical techniques to develop recommendations.

While case usage is ubiquitous for MBAs, they are somewhat less commonly employed in undergraduate classrooms. This is at least partially due to the fact that many OM undergraduate courses are designed to simply introduce concepts and techniques rather than to give the students much of a chance to apply them. That does not, however, mean that cases cannot be used effectively in any form at the undergraduate level. Your Heizer/Render OM text has over 80 1-2 page cases that are entirely appropriate for undergrads.

I have successfully introduced cases into my undergraduate courses in each of the following 3 ways:

Discussion only. Some cases do not require any sophisticated analysis and just ask students to consider the situation and generate and evaluate possible strategies. These are prime candidates to be used solely as a basis of class discussion.

Instructor presents model. Many cases require a substantial amount of modeling and analysis, but instructors may not want to allocate the class time that students need to complete the entire case analysis. In my class I ask them to summarize the decision scenario, and I lead them through the required decision analysis.

Students conduct full analysis. Some cases are so rich that I find it beneficial to have the students complete the entire case analysis as they would if they were MBAs. I assign these cases as out-of-class group homework that the students complete over 2 weeks or so. I spend anywhere from 20-60 minutes in class discussing some of the additional issues.

If an instructor is new to using cases in the classroom, I recommend that he or she start slow and introduce 1-2 cases at a time. It is not necessary to redesign a course completely.

Matt is editing a special issue of INFORMS Transactions on Education about innovative ways to use cases. He invites submissions to: http://pubsonline.informs.org/pb-assets/ITED%20Call%20for%20Papers%20-%20Cases%20-%20Final.pdf

Introducing Operations Management 12th ed and Principles of OM 10th ed

We are very pleased to announce that the latest editions of our two texts are now available for your use in summer and fall classes! Has it been 36 years already since Jay and I wrote the first edition? As they say, time flies when you are having fun–and indeed we have enjoyed this tremendous experience working together for nearly four decades. We are pleased that the books have become the leading texts in OM, with millions of copies in print in eight languages.

New for this edition–lots! First, we introduce our new coauthor, Prof. Chuck Munson, at Washington State University (more about Chuck next week).

Next, as you may be aware, we theme each edition around a new company, with videos, case studies, photos, and a Global Company Profile. In the past, we have featured Hard Rock, Arnold Palmer Hospital, Frito-Lay, Darden, the Orlando Magic NBA team, and others. In our latest editions, we introduce one of the top-rated airlines in the US, Alaska Air, and feature its behind-the-scenes critical use of OM. (We will do a blog just on the five new video case studies later this week).

In addition to numerous changes in all the chapters, we expand our decision support software options in this revision. Not only do Excel OM and POM software come free to adopters/students, but we now include “Create Your Own Spreadsheet” examples in 11 chapters. We hope these samples will help expand students’ spreadsheet capabilities.

The vast selection of homework problems has been expanded once again, and now tops 807 tried-and-true problems–more by far than competing texts. These problems appear in the text and/or in MyOMLab. Instructors tell us that a broad selection of problems to choose from for homework, quizzes, and exams is critical to their courses so the same set need not be used from semester to semester.

To order a desk copy, just click on the button on the top of this blog–and let us know what you think!

Guest Post: Class Discussion–From Blank Stares to True Engagement in Your OM Class

Our Guest Post comes from Dr. Jay R. Howard, who is the dean at Butler University. His most recent book is Discussion in the College: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in Person and Online (Josey-Bass, 2015).

Thirty years of research have demonstrated that when students are engaged in the classroom, they learn more. Classroom discussion is likely the most commonly used strategy for actively engaging students. Yet there’s always the possibility that our invitation for students to engage will be met with silence.

Sociologists have long contended that our behavior is guided by norms. Professors believe that one classroom norm is that students are expected to pay attention. But in most college classrooms students are not required to pay attention. The real norm is paying civil attention—or creating the appearance of paying attention. Students do this in a variety of ways. They write in their notebooks, nod their heads, make fleeting eye contact, and chuckle when the professor attempts to be funny. Why can students get away with only paying civil attention? The answer is that we as faculty let them.

We believe they should be self-motivated to complete assignments and prepare for class. Therefore, we don’t embarrass students into preparing for and participating in discussion. The result is that students can safely slide by, paying only civil attention in most college classrooms.

How do we get students to move beyond civil attention to true engagement in our OM classes? Perhaps the most effective strategy is allowing students to formulate their thoughts prior to being called on to verbally participate. The think-pair-share classroom assessment technique is one example: Ask students to take one minute and write a response to a question. Then ask students to share their thoughts. Another strategy is to structure your course so it requires students to come to class having read an assignment and prepared a short response paper or answer an on-line JIT quiz. In these ways, faculty can create new classroom norms, replacing the norm of civil attention with the expectation that all students come prepared to participate in classroom discussion.

Guest Post: Designing the Effective OM Classroom

Today’s guest Post comes from Prof. Matt Drake, who is the Witt Faculty Fellow in SCM at Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business.

Most of us have heard the common refrain that a student “has never been good at math.” But I have found that the vast majority of my students possess the analytical capabilities that my courses require. Some just need to gain the confidence in these abilities. My courses are largely still lecture-based on the surface when I present new material. However, I do try to turn the class into active problem-solving sessions wherever possible to keep the students engaged.

When I present example problems, I sometimes get feedback that I go too quickly for some of them to keep up with me. As a compromise, I post the Excel files that I build during class on our course website so that students can download the files and compare their notes to mine.

I also try to use at least a few cases in each course. In my experience, students enjoy and appreciate considering the real-world decision scenarios that cases offer. I have 3 additional thoughts for designing effective OM courses:

Be understanding and flexible with deadlines and attendance, especially with part-time students. I always accept late assignments with a point deduction to be fair to other students.
Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” No one person can be an expert in everything. If students ask questions to which I do not know the answer, I tell them that I do not have an answer off the top of my head. I then try to follow-up after I have had the chance to research the issue. Students seem to appreciate this honesty.
Students appreciate rapid feedback to their questions and to their work on assignments. I try to return all graded assignments within a week, and I reply to emails as soon as I can.

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.