Tag: Class Exercise

Guest Post: A First Day of Class OM Exercise

steve harrodDr. Steven Harrod is Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Dayton. Today, he shares a tip on teaching critical thinking.

For many students, OM is an intimidating field of study–the first course that blends mathematical methods with qualitative decisions. For example, queuing theory is clearly mathematical, but choosing which queue structure is often a subjective decision. Today’s hot topics of “big data” and analytics require problem formulation skills, so I begin the OM course with an exercise to promote critical thinking. In particular, I seek to train my students to formulate decision questions in quantitative terms. I pose the question repeatedly, “What are the measurements?”

I motivate this discussion with a news story on health care, specifically, whether a surgically inserted stent or drug therapy is a better choice for patient care. First, I introduce the topic and instruct the students to think carefully about the news story. I ask them: Who are the stakeholders? Who are the decision makers? What are the objectives? What are the measurements?  And finally: What defines success? I then play the news story audio (which is found here).

Almost invariably, initial student answers will be vague, such as “improve the quality of health care” or “provide high quality care.” But drill the students to focus on tangible measures. Ask: “How do I measure that?” After some dialogue, you should reach agreement on more precise measures such as life expectancy, death in surgery, cost of treatment, cost of drug, duration of treatment, etc.

The news story presents this question as an argument between a Dr. Teirstein and a Dr. Topol, but after working through these discussion questions, you will find the real conflict between these doctors is over the choice of objectives and measures. Dr. Topol’s primary objective is lower cost, but Dr. Teirstein’s is fast treatment. This discussion is in fact a prelude to future topics in the course. In so many areas of OM, cost and speed are fundamental tradeoffs. No where is this more evident than in the study of queuing theory (Module D). Thus the debate over healthcare is at its root a debate over the balance between fundamentally opposed performance measures.

A detailed teaching note for this lesson is available here.

Guest Post: A Pareto Exercise Using M&M’s

Today’s Guest Post comes from Coleman R. Rich, who is Chair of Elon University’s  Marketing and Entrepreneurship Department. Coleman is also  Senior Lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management.

I used many quality tools in the textile industry before coming to academia and I wanted to create an exercise where students could understand the use of two common tools, the check sheet and the Pareto chart.

Here are the items needed:  Blank check sheet, Graph paper, paper plates, and a 1.69 oz bag of M&M’s for each student.

Instructions:  I tell the students they are finished goods inspectors and each color of M&M is a defect.  They are to count the number of defects using tick marks and record that information on their check sheet.  Then they are to rank each color from high number of occurrences to the lowest number of occurrences and calculate the cumulative percent.  From this information, draw a Pareto Chart of the colors on the graph paper and correctly label the chart.

Discussion:  After the exercise, I call on students to tell me the number of blue, green, orange, etc. defects in their bag and the total number of M&M’s in their bag.  I record this information on the board for the class to see the randomness of the different colors in each bag.  I focus on the total number of M&M’s in each bag which you’ll see will vary between 63 and 57 M&M’s per bag.  This leads to a discussion of variation and SPC.  I also discuss what is Critical to Quality to the manufacturer and the Consumer.  Finally I have the students visually inspect the M&M’s for chips, cracks, shapes, etc.,  and ask why the Mars company doesn’t try to create a perfect M&M.  I think you know the answer to that.

Dr. Matt Valle, Professor of Management, here at Elon University has taken this exercise a step further using other quality tools in our paper, “Quality Tools for Project Management:  A Classroom Exercise” to be published in Business Education Innovation Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, December 2012.

 

Guest Post: Spicing Up the Assignment Problem in Class at Washington State U.

Chuck Munson is Associate Professor of Operations Management at Washington State University. He is also the author of the Instructor’s Resource Manual for our OM texts. Here Dr. Munson describes an interesting class exercise for Ch.15.

In an attempt to generate student interest in the assignment problem, I recently created a little in-class exercise called “Celebrity Apprentice,” where the task for the students was to assign each member of a celebrity team to a specific task for a rich potential client. The goal was to secure business from this client, who’s managers are accustomed to responding positively to bribery and favors. The six tasks were: (1) handle the money, (2) take the managers to a bar and drive them home, (3) sing to them in a private concert, (4) take them golfing, (5) locate female escorts for the managers, and (6) negotiate the contract. The six celebrities on the team were: (1) Lindsey Lohan, (2) Tiger Woods, (3) Mel Gibson, (4) Lady Gaga, (5) Charlie Sheen, and (6) Chuck. (By inserting yourself in the list, you can provide several self-deprecating remarks that the students may enjoy regarding your respective abilities to perform tasks.)

When I tried the exercise, the students laughed a lot, and they enjoyed shouting out ratings and arguing with each other about the scores. Some tasks led to ambiguous ratings, depending on the celebrity. For example, for the “take them to the bar and drive them home” category, certain celebrities might be rated high based on their respective partying skills; however, several of the same celebrities have been picked up for drunk driving or even getting into car accidents while drunk. So what rating would be appropriate? In some cases, the instructor can even assign ratings outside of the normal range for extreme fit or lack thereof (again, this is where self-deprecating remarks can draw some laughs). The students seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing, and I expect to repeat this exercise in the future. If you try it, have fun! The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.