Dr. Chuck Munson – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Introducing Chuck Munson, Our New Coauthor

Prof. Chuck Munson joins the Heizer/Render team

Jay and I first met when we were teaching at Boston University in 1973. A decade later, we wrote the 1st edition of our Operations Management text–and have been great friends since, talking or Skyping almost every day. So you can imagine how hard it was to bring in a new coauthor to our close-knit, longtime team. It took about 5 years of searching and auditioning before we found the perfect person–and his name is Chuck Munson. Chuck had earlier written our Instructor’s Resource Manual and Test Bank, had rewritten the Supply Chain chapter, and had added a new chapter called Supply Chain Analytics.

But what a scholar we found! He has published over 25 articles in top journals in our field, including Production and Operations Management, IIE Transactions, Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Annals of Operations Research, and Interfaces. He is also editor of the book The Supply Chain Management Casebook, and coauthor of Quantity Discounts: An Overview and Practical Guide for Buyers and Sellers. He is senior editor for Production and Operations Management and serves on the editorial review board of 4 other journals.

Perhaps more importantly to the pedagogy we value in textbooks, he is a top-notch instructor. Just this month, Chuck was awarded the highest teaching honor given at Washington State University, the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award. He has also twice won each of the following: the WSU College of Business Outstanding Teaching Award, the Service Award, the WSU MBA Professor of the Year Award; and once the Outstanding Research Award. Chuck’s masters and Ph.D. are in operations management from Washington University. He was Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at Washington State for 2 years and worked for 3 years as a financial analyst for Contel Telephone Corporation.

You can reach Chuck at munson@wsu.edu.

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: The Distribution Game– A Perfect Class Engagement Activity

Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Chuck Munson, who is Professor of Operations Management at Washington State University.

It’s not always easy to find an activity that combines true learning with fun and competition. For more than 15 years I have been successfully using “The Distribution Game” in undergraduate supply chain management and MBA operations classes. The game was originally designed by Peter Jackson and John Muckstadt at Cornell http://people.orie.cornell.edu/~jackson/distgame.html, and it can still be downloaded for free (although it may require a modern platform conversion).

Each day for 200 days, the player must choose how many units to order for three retail locations and the supplying warehouse (so this is a multi-level inventory problem). It takes 15 days for the product to reach the warehouse from the supplier and 5 days to reach the stores from the warehouse. Demand is random. The animation is a little bit crude by today’s standards, but it’s still quite effective to see little trucks carrying products across the screen each day.

I like the game because it can be played whether or not inventory formulas have been taught. Students can try to use common sense and some can perform quite well doing so; nevertheless, they seldom beat my performance that’s completely formula-driven. Imbedded in the game are issues of safety stock, balancing setup and holding costs, lead time effects, and lumpy demand at the warehouse. We can usually get through about four games during an hour in the computer lab or with laptops in class.

Game parameters can change: I vary the demand distribution, relative holding and setup costs, and lead times. For me, the most important learning outcomes are: (1) equalize total holding and setup costs, (2) the warehouse should order in integer multiples of the combined retailer order sizes, and (3) the pipeline should be empty when time runs out.

Have fun, and consider awarding prizes to the winners!

Guest Post: Using MyOMLab for Online Teaching

Our Guest Post today comes from Dr. Chuck Munson, who is Associate Professor of Operations Management at Washington State University. His earlier blog for us was called “Spicing Up the Assignment Problem”.

I used to shy away from overload teaching opportunities for online courses because I initially hated the whole online teaching experience and was almost embarrassed to call it “teaching.” The availability of MyOMLab (with a little help from the bad economy) has changed my views.

While I believe that there’s still no substitute for the face-to-face learning experience, online education does help serve a niche of place-bound students. And for my operations management course, MyOMLab removes a lot of time and strain. The time that I used to spend grading can now be spent on responding to questions and providing information to students. For many of the problems, the built-in learning aids can answer a lot of the students’ questions. Also, the students really like the extra chances that they get to solve questions correctly. And I’ve found the test bank questions to work well—it’s very easy to select questions, and the multiple-choice tests that I’ve given (open-book and 2.5 hours to solve 25 questions) usually provide a good grade distribution. The excellent company videos seem particularly useful in online environments.

Here are some unsolicited student comments regarding MyOMLab from my spring, 2012 online course:

“Great information and I liked the OM lab.”

“I almost feel that I got more interaction in this online course than if I were in person in a large lecture hall. MyLab was also a great experience—much better than many sites I have used during my WSU Online time.”

“The MyOMLab was crucial for success in learning the formulas for calculations.”

“Excellent—couldn’t have been better.”

“In the case of this class, the online environment works very well. The assignments and MyLab learning were both great, and I learned a lot.”

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.