We present an exercise for teaching the transportation problem using a mix of spatial and randomly generated data. It illustrates the potential of using qualitative and quantitative data and is suitable for undergraduate or introductory business school courses on operations research (OR), logistics, and supply chain management. It poses two…

The simple vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a common topic of discussion in introductory operations research/management science courses. The VRP can be framed in a variety of ways, and it can be difficult to solve to optimality. For solution purposes, introductory textbooks demonstrate how Excel's Evolutionary Solver (ES) add-in produces a…

The Tangibles in Operations Strategy (TANGOS) exercise provides students with the direct experience of designing a firm's operations function. Specifically, students must engage in decision making with respect to the structural decision areas in a firm's operations strategy, by considering the firm's product strategy and span of control, process…

Facility placement is of strategic importance to most organizations as a well-placed distribution center minimizes delivery costs and reduces fulfillment lead times, thus improving customer service levels. Because organizations value the location planning process, this teaching brief offers an exercise that analyzes the planning process using the…

It is often challenging to make decisions about how to teach planning within an undergraduate operations management module. This article defines and compares the two standard options available to instructors: (a) the traditional "technical" approach or (b) the "conceptual" or "conversational" approach. Through a…

This paper proposes the production of animated comics in POWTOON to serve as a visual collaborative tool and a teaching-learning strategy for a course on Operations Research. This proposal aims to achieve meaningful learning of the subject matter, incentivizing the creativity of undergraduate students of marketing and business at the Guadalajara…

This article explores the role that corporations can play in the creation or failure of a sustainable society. A review of the concept of sustainability in the Australian Curriculum: Geography is made and then linked to a comparison of the legal framework guiding business activities of traditional corporations and those of B Corporations, which…

Internationalization is a key contemporary debate within Higher Education (HE). Many universities worldwide proclaim their "international" status, citing quantitative indicators, particularly international student and staff recruitment and outbound student mobility data to illustrate this. In this paper, we focus on the non-mobile…

The case is based on an actual product introduction, and is designed to provide instruction on the new product development process. With the cost to launch new products estimated at least US $15 million and new product failure rates ranging from 40% to 80%, it is imperative that students learn how to determine the financial and market feasibility…

This article investigates the current use of case studies in the teaching of Operational Research (OR) in the UK: how and where they are used; how they are developed; and whether there is an interest in training this area. It is aimed at lecturers teaching OR who are using or planning to use case studies in their teaching. It may also be of…

Decision making in most universities is taught within the conventional OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) paradigm. This paradigm is known to be "hard" since it is consisted of mathematical tools, and normally suitable for solving structured problems. In complex situations the conventional OR/MS paradigm proves to be…

Often, users of information systems (both automated and manual) must analyze those systems in a "black box" fashion, without being able to see the internals of how the system is supposed to work. In this case of business process outsourcing, an insurance industry customer encounters an ongoing stream of customer service issues, with both…