Category Archives: Operations Management

Book Review – Scaling Up Excellence

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Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, 2014

The gist of the book is how to scale an organization from one location to many while maintaining the success found at the first location. Portions of this book could work for my Operations Strategy class’s lecture on scalability. I already cover a lot of information in that class on internet platforms and digital economics, but this book complements that material by focusing on scaling a real-world service organization. Chapter 2, about how much customization to allow from one location to the next, seems particularly relevant.

While the book has some really good information, it is roughly 2x too long. Many chapters are so packed with examples that it is hard to remember the message at hand. I would have edited out about half the examples, especially since many were repetitive and many were mediocre/confusing examples of the phenomena at hand.

Tips for preventing (and my experience with) online cheating

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Once we switched to remote learning in the spring, I had issues with cheating on the first online exam through Canvas. My exam was multiple choice, with students allowed to log in and take it over a defined time range. I write all my own questions, so students couldn’t just look them up online, and students sign an honor statement before seeing the first question. However, in the end, 17 of 68 students admitted to cheating.  The main 2 ways I saw cheating were (1) a bunch of answers added as soon as the exam started (unreasonably quickly) and (2) members of the same group taking the exam at the same time and submitting answers nearly simultaneously.  The first way was a clear indicator that students were sent some/all of the answers by other students in the class. The second way was harder to find and required putting multiple quiz logs up next to each other. 

The only (major) mistake I made was misinterpreting Canvas’ settings for when students can see the questions they missed. The quiz setting says “Let Students See Their Quiz Responses (Incorrect Questions Will Be Marked in Student Feedback).” If you check this, then you can specify when students can see the correct answers. I checked it and specified a future date for when they could see correct answers, thinking that this would not give them ANY feedback until that date. However, they are immediately told what they got right and wrong upon submission (without being explicitly given the right answers). As such, they could easily share correct answers (and infer what should have been answered for the incorrect multiple choice questions). I would suggest not checking this box while giving the exam. You can always go back later and check it in order to let them see the correct answers after everyone has submitted.

An OM teaching blog that I follow has good suggestions for preventing cheating on online exams:

  1. Use varied question types. Refrain from having an exam with all multiple choice or true and false questions. Our MyOMLab’s algorithmic problems are a perfect complement to these questions.
  2. Creatively remind students of academic integrity policies. Create and post a video explaining the guidelines for the online exam and review the institution’s academic integrity policy and consequences that are listed in the course syllabus.
  3. Require students to sign an academic integrity contract. After reviewing the academic integrity reminder video, have students electronically sign a contract that lists what the university considers cheating.
  4. Restrict testing window. Similar to how on-campus final exams have a designated testing slot for each course, create the same online. Have every student start the exam around the same time and limit how long each student will have to take the exam. If you have students in different time zones, consider offering three sets of tests, at 3 different start times.
  5. Change test question sequence. In the test settings, have the order of test questions be different for each exam along with the order of answer choices for each test question.
  6. Delay score availability. Set a later date after the testing window ends for students to see their score and feedback and do not make the score available for immediate view after test completion. This way, one student who finishes early cannot see their score and then advise students who have not completed the test yet.

Book Review – The Long Tail

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The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
by Chris Anderson, 2006

A bit outdated on its examples, but it’s still fun to read about Myspace and early Amazon. Documents the early ability of the internet to offer a scalable solution to long-tail demands. Many more products can be in inventory for an online retailer than a brick-and-mortar store, as sales are aggregated across space. Digital goods take this to the extreme by having no significant inventory costs, allowing for the “stocking” of every possible item. Some fun graphs from the book:

Paper Published – Incentive‐Compatible Prehospital Triage in Emergency Medical Services

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Joint work with Alex Mills. Forthcoming in Production and Operations Management: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/poms.13036

Abstract: The Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system is designed to handle life-threatening emergencies, but a large and growing number of non-emergency patients are accessing hospital-based healthcare through EMS. A national survey estimated that 17% of ambulance trips to hospital Emergency Departments (EDs) were medically unnecessary, and that these unnecessary trips make up an increasing proportion of all EMS trips. These non-emergency patients are a controllable arrival stream that can be re-directed to an appropriate care provider, reducing congestion in EDs, reducing costs to patients and healthcare payers, and improving patient health, but prehospital triage to identify these patients is almost never implemented by EMS providers in the United States. Using a decision model, we show that prehospital triage is unlikely to occur under the current structure of fee-for-service reimbursements, regardless of how effective the triage process might be, unless low-acuity patients are unprofitable and a hospital is willing to coordinate with EMS. We demonstrate several mechanisms a payer such as Medicare could use to promote prehospital triage: reforming fee-for-service reimbursements or offering a value-based payment, such as bundled payments or shared savings contracts. Using data from a national survey and levels of triage effectiveness demonstrated in the literature, we conservatively estimate that Medicare alone could save between $3 and $70 million per year (depending on triage effectiveness) by providing incentives for prehospital triage. Between 26,500 and 628,000 non-emergency patients could be diverted to more appropriate care options, making prehospital triage a practical step to address hospital emergency department crowding.

Teaching Schedule

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At UC, I will be teaching Operations Planning and Scheduling (OM4076), a methodological course, this fall and spring to undergraduates. I will teach Operations Strategy (OM5085), which is a case-based capstone course, in the spring as well. All my work is going toward getting my fall course ready and getting some research submitted, so there won’t be many posts in the near future.

Book Review – The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

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The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade
by Pietra Rivoli, 2005

Very interesting discussion of the realities of growing cotton, weaving and dyeing shirts, and what happens on the second-hand market after clothing is donated. Less interesting, and much longer, discussion on international trade agreements and import quotas. That part can certainly be skimmed.

I imagine there have been minor changes to the realities of the market since the book came out, but most of the principles should still hold.

Maria and I listened to the book on tape. The reader’s voice was fine.

Weakest Links 20180404

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It’s hard to consistently get multiple weekly link roundups (one for sports, one for energy, one for other stuff) out, and I’ve been doing a bad job of it this year. I’m going to collapse them to one weekly link roundup on Wednesday afternoons. This is the first attempt at that. Here are your weakest links:

Sports:
The Four-Man Outfield and Position-Less Baseball.
The Pacers Are Bucking Every NBA Trend. And It’s Working. We’ll see how it goes in the playoffs.
Fake Sister Jean Twitter.

Energy:
FirstEnergy Files for Bankruptcy; To Close 4 Nuclear Reactors.

Other:
How to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane.
How to Fall Asleep in 2 Minutes. Already my specialty.
How to make a ship bigger — cut it in half first.
Army Strips Down Network To Survive Major War.

Book Review – The Professor Is In

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The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job
by Karen Kelsky, 2015

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who plans to be on the academic job market in the next 3-5 years. You’ll want to read it early in your academic career to understand the difference between “good lines” on your CV and less valuable ones. You’ll want to re-visit it before applying to understand how to craft excellent job documents and how to prep for interviews.

This book is well-written and very practical. It is from the perspective of a former department chair who now runs her own consulting business to fill in the information gap between what tenured academics know and what grad students don’t.

I would offer one warning to students in business fields: the book is written from the perspective of humanities majors. In those fields, you are often expected to be publishing books and your prospects for academic employment are terrible. Books are not valued in business fields like A-journal publications are. With that in mind, however, the book is still very useful. I will be sharing it with fellow IU Ph.D. students.