Tag: Dr. Steve Harrod

Guest Post: What This Danish Prof Learned Teaching OM Online

Dr. Steven Harrod is Associate Professor in the DTU Diplom Department at the Technical University of Denmark.

On March 12, 2020, all education at the Technical University of Denmark made an emergency conversion to online services. I was fairly lucky. I had a home office, and a high quality webcam. Many of my colleagues did not. One colleague used his white refrigerator as a whiteboard!

Ergonomics are a real problem, and it is really hard to keep eye contact when sitting close to multiple monitors with a webcam placed above. I would strongly recommend using a tripod-mounted camera, a gyroscopic mouse, and giving lectures from a standing position. Absolute luxury would be a green screen effect, weatherman style, where I would walk in front of the slides.

Online lectures are tiring, both for you and your students. It is hard to focus on a laptop screen for long periods, especially when the screen is cluttered with faces, chat window, and a shared presentation. It is absolutely critical that you plan a 15 minute coffee break within every hour.

Strongly consider replacing some of your live lectures with pre-recorded content. I estimate 30 minutes of scripted lesson is equal to an hour or more of live lecture. Use a quality video editing software (I recommend Camtasia). Budget about 1 hour of editing for every 10 minutes of produced video. YouTube is a great distribution channel.

You may feel that your students are not participating in the online lectures. Don’t panic! Encourage the use of chat for student questions and feedback, which many students will find more accessible.

Is this the future of education? I don’t think so. Who wants to pay tuition to watch 6 hours of Discovery Channel every day? However, when used as part of a planned and balanced mix of teaching methods, online education offers flexibility and a solution to unavoidable constraints. Next time I have to be away at a conference, I will just plug my laptop into the hotel flat screen, pull out my air mouse, and class will be in session!

 

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: Making LP Relevant to Students

steve harrodDr. Steven Harrod is Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Dayton. He shares a tip on teaching LP today.

It takes some creativity to make linear programming (see Module B in the Heizer/Render text) relevant to students. Here is an activity that offers a discussion of energy, transportation, and air pollution. The topic is coal-burning electric power plants, and it is an example of the blending problem.

Nearly half of all electricity in the U.S. is produced by burning coal, and nearly all of this coal moves by rail. Coal is an organic material that varies considerably in cost, power, and pollution content. Power plants frequently blend different coals to achieve their desired performance. Trains magazine published a detailed article on the movement of coal and its consumption by electric power plants in 2010. The readings and class materials may be downloaded here.

The documents package includes a quiz you may assign to motivate the reading assignment, a longer version of this Guest Post, and a sample spreadsheet model. Start the class discussion by drawing the class’s attention to the power plant at Monroe, Michigan. If you have an overhead projector with internet access, use Google maps to display a satellite photo of the plant. The lakeside plant has a prominent railroad loop and coal storage facility. You may also wish to explain how a power plant converts coal into electricity, and the environment concerns (sulfur causes acid rain and ash must be disposed of).

The challenge question for the students is: what coal should this plant purchase to satisfy energy and pollution limits at minimum cost? The formulated and solved LP leads to an optimal blend of three of the five coal sources. Ask the students, “is this intuitive?” Would you have been able to reach this conclusion without LP? Discuss at length and experiment with reducing or eliminating the pollution limits. This exercise may lead to a lengthy discussion of energy policy, environmental policy, and their joint effect on transportation demand.

Guest Post: Tying Scheduling Back to Operations Strategy in Your Course

steve harrodDr. Steven Harrod is Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Dayton and can be reached at steven.harrod@udayton.edu.

For those of you including Chapter 15, Short-Term Scheduling, in your syllabus, here is a great way to tie that topic back to the beginning of your course and to Chapter 2, Operations Strategy in a Global Environment. A significant topic in Chapter 15 is “Sequencing Jobs”, which is a logical extension to Module D– Waiting-Line Models.

In class, I work out three fundamental queue disciplines: first come first serve (FCFS), shortest processing time (SPT), and earliest due date (EDD). Following Example 5 from Chapter 15 of the Heizer/Render text, I walk my class through the solution of these three sequences using a custom worksheet that you may obtain online by clicking here.

I ask the students to recall the three competitive advantages of Chapter 2 (low-cost, differentiation, and response), and how sometimes it is unclear which competitive advantage applies. For example, does McDonald’s pursue a low-cost or differentiation strategy?

I then ask the students to label each sequencing rule by the competitive advantage it best aligns with. Clearly, EDD best supports response, because it most respects the timeliness of delivery. Then I impress upon the students how SPT leads to low-cost competitive advantage (WIP, flowtime). Finally, I assert that FCFS is a differentiation strategy, because it enforces social justice in the service pattern, and thus seeks to make each customer feel valued and unique. Viewed from the way in which they queue their customers, it then becomes obvious that McDonald’s pursues a low-cost strategy, Wendy’s pursues a differentiation strategy, and Domino’s pursues a response strategy.

I close this lecture by impressing on students how choices in Operations Management effectively dictate the strategic competitive advantage of the firm. Firms must align their stated strategy and their operating rules to each other, or else be perpetually in a mode of crisis and confusion.

Guest Post: Using Excel Teaching Videos at U. of Dayton

steve harrodDr. Steven Harrod is Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Dayton. If you teach Excel modeling in your OM class, you will enjoy Steve’s detailed “how to” videos.

Videos are a great  way to help students learn the complexities of modeling in spreadsheets. Students can be overwhelmed when this material is presented live in lecture. Too often, students experience computer technical problems, and become lost in lecture while they attempt to fix their technical issue. These videos allow students to follow the lesson at their own pace, as they resolve problems such as installing add-ins (or even charging their battery!).

The first video supports Chapter 4, Forecasting. Titled “Creating an Exponential Forecast in Excel, Including Error Statistics” (http://youtu.be/uHy5tG1Rdvg), it walks
students through the process of formatting a spreadsheet, generating an exponential forecast, and calculating error statistics for that forecast. This video, and the others, was purposely recorded at a low screen resolution and high magnification, so that the visual clarity is high. The runtime for this video is 23 minutes.

The second and third videos are fundamentally linear programming exercises. “How to Create a Linear Programming Transportation Model” (http://youtu.be/RZX2bmoCzLI) is self-explanatory (runtime 14 minutes). Sharp eyed readers will recognize this as Problem 16 from Module B.

“Aggregate Planning on Microsoft Excel, Transportation Model” (http://youtu.be/m44gSMpb3Ic) is another transportation model, this time from Chapter 13, Aggregate Planning. This problem is “Planning Example 1” from the Heizer/Render text (Tables 13.2 and 13.3). This video is longer, at 36 minutes, because the data entry and model structure for the aggregate planning problem are more complex.

I hope you find these videos useful in your course presentation, and I welcome your comments at steven.harrod@udayton.edu.