Decision makers are often faced with ill-defined problems such as determining the odds of unlikely occurrences. However, class settings often explicitly provide such values within problem sets or case studies. In this paper, we discuss an incident of a waitress at a bar being shown her own stolen identification. Using this problem, we motivate the use of mathematical modeling to decompose a problem to determine the odds of a rare event. Similar problem decomposition methods can be used in a variety of business and engineering problems.

The MotherLand Air case and game provide students with a first-hand experience in revenue management. The game is conducted in the classroom, and students, who have the opportunity to prepare in advance, work in teams. During the exercise, students make and revise pricing and protection-level decisions over a six-month, predeparture time horizon for two simulated flights. The case provides an introduction to nested reservation systems and overbooking and pricing polices. Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.

Priceline.com is an Internet-based corporation offering services (airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, and home mortgages) with the option for consumers to dictate prices. Priceline's original success stemmed from its innovative “name your price” approach whereby consumers bid for service with Priceline to find a willing provider at the bid price. Consumers are only allowed to bid once on a service so they must be strategic in bidding—bid too low and potentially lose out on service, bid too high and overpay for the service. While they are only allowed to bid once per product, bidders can slightly alter their service and potentially re-bid in an effort to get new information (from failed attempts)—such alterations may include a different class of hotel (3 star versus 4), a flight with 1 stop versus direct, or (as in the case below) a different class (economy versus luxury) of rental car. The case is designed to cover a broad range of topics while introducing students to auctions. The case teaches strategic bidding while covering probability, decision analysis, and integer programming. The case has had great success at the undergraduate and MBA levels as students enjoy the setting, are familiar with Priceline, and immediately see an everyday use of management science. Case Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.

Quantitative models for inventory decision making in a multi-echelon distribution system are very challenging for most undergraduate business or engineering students. To expose students to the challenges of managing multi-echelon inventory levels in an uncertain environment, we have created the Inventory Control at Spiegel Grove classroom exercise, which simulates the inventory management process for a single product in a serial supply chain. Shipments are subject to both transportation quality variability and product quality variability, and students are challenged with adjusting their levels of safety inventory appropriately without carrying an inordinate amount of stock.

Business students who rely on spreadsheets can use management science only to the extent that they can build a spreadsheet model of an unstructured business situation. Spreadsheets are the primary vehicle for analytical work in business, are advantageous for modeling and model representation, and are used by management science practitioners as well as end-user modelers. There is a common misperception that spreadsheets are somehow “easy” to use. However, the spreadsheet is a powerful rapid development computer programming language that requires software engineering for serious work. People struggle to efficiently build effective, transferable spreadsheet models. Students need certain spreadsheet engineering principles that they do not know, but value highly when they learn them. Spreadsheet engineering can be taught using a hierarchical “Skills, Capabilities and Practices Model.” Low-level “Skills” need to be evaluated and fixed early in a spreadsheetoriented management science course. High-level “Capabilities” and “Practices” should be integrated throughout the course. Embracing spreadsheet engineering provides a magnificent opportunity for management science instructors to increase relevance and student satisfaction while increasing the likelihood of management science application by our graduates.

In this paper we describe an approach that utilizes Excel macros to help OR/MS instructors to enhance and assess their students' learning. We begin by explaining a specific macro, Data Generator, which mainly helps statistics instructors to create assignment questions where numbers or data sets used in the questions are randomly generated according to the instructions specified by instructors. Because of the potentially narrow application range of our particular macro, we also describe an approach that can be used for more general questions. For the most part, this more general approach requires simply recording a macro and then pasting a few other instructions into the resulting code to make the recorded macro more user-friendly. We also provide a suggested procedure to help instructors to grade the students' answers automatically.

This paper reports an innovative use of a popular operations management case to illustrate the usefulness and application of a powerful analysis technique called Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). DEA is often the only available tool that enables managers to evaluate the relative efficiencies of various business units in the presence of multiple performance measures. Applichem is a case study about a multinational chemical company, with six manufacturing plants located all over the world. The manufacturing plants' efficiencies are highly varied and in the presence of excessive capacity, management is having a difficult time determining which plants must be shut down. This case is often studied from an optimization perspective, with the objective of matching customer demands with plant capacities at the lowest possible cost. The case involves multiple measures of performance (e.g. labor cost, material cost, etc.), which makes it ideal for introducing and demonstrating DEA from a practical perspective. This paper details how such an analysis can be presented in a business classroom.

In order to illustrate how various areas of operations research interact in an actual manufacturing scenario, we propose the use of a strawberry jam-making supply chain model consisting of an inventory partner, a production scheduling partner and a delivery partner. The problem is to minimise the overall supply chain cost consisting of inventory order cost, inventory unit purchasing cost, inventory storage cost, transport booking cost, jam storage cost, delivery travel distance cost and jam arrival earliness and tardiness costs. We report on how we devised and taught this case to First Year Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering students at the University of Melbourne.