The center-of-gravity, Weber, and rectilinear minisum problems are common exemplars in single-facility (single-source) continuous location theory and the first of these is covered in many operations management (OM) textbooks. Extensions to multiple-facility (or multisource) continuous location problems are seldom covered in OM textbooks. I have…

Spreadsheets help businesses run effectively and efficiently. However, many spreadsheets contain errors. Research provides taxonomies and guidance on preventing spreadsheet errors; this information often is not incorporated into training. Training students to use Excel functions and good spreadsheet practices is critical. This instructional…

The purpose of this paper is to present an automated approach for the marking and grading of the commonly used accounting practice assignment for first year financial accounting. The automated system has potential benefits for the reduction in time and cost to the running of the course as well as providing students with an objective standardised…

There is an increasing demand to introduce Introductory Business Analytics (IBA) courses into undergraduate business education. Many real-world business contexts require predictive analytics to understand the determinants of a dichotomous outcome; hence, IBA courses should include binary logistic regression analysis. This article provides our…

NoSQL databases have been used in organizations for decades. Few database textbooks on the market, however, have suitable materials about NoSQL beyond general introductions for typical business students. In fact, users of the typical NoSQL systems on the software market need to have certain computer programming skills. This teaching tip introduces…

Supply chain management students are introduced to a variety of modeling concepts. Yet learning facility location and capacity allocation modeling to the level of application and mastery proves difficult for the typical undergraduate business student. Spreadsheets facilitate the teaching of optimization modeling; however, providing feedback to…

There are a variety of discrete facility location models that have practical relevance for operations management and management science courses. Integer linear programming (ILP) is the standard technique for solving such problems. An alternative approach that is often conceptually appealing to students is to pose the problem as one of finding the…

Over the past few years, academics have undertaken initiatives to bridge the gap between theory and practice in the ever-growing field of business analytics, including implementing real-life student projects in all shapes and forms. Every year since 2015, Manhattan College has invited student teams from across North America and elsewhere in the…

Data literacy has become a much sought after skill by organizations as the importance of data driven decision making continues to rise in importance. This study explores the teaching of Tableau as a supplement to Excel to enhance the data literacy skills of students. Twenty-eight students taking an introductory course in Business Analytics and…

In this teaching case, we describe an experiential learning project that allows students to perform sentiment analysis on a set of tweets (posts made on the social media platform, Twitter) by collecting and analyzing posts that include key words selected by the students. Sentiment analysis refers to the process of identifying and categorizing…

The authors' objective was to uncover the difference in competency when teaching Excel to undergraduate students on two distinct and discrete operating platforms. The authors calibrated competency by comparing scores of MOS-EXCEL Certification Test results. The authors conclude that the null hypothesis indicating no difference in mean scores of…

It has become increasingly important for future business professionals to understand statistical computing methods as data science has gained widespread use in contemporary organizational decision processes in recent years. Used by scores of academics and practitioners in a variety of fields, Monte Carlo simulation is one of the most broadly…

The authors use a capital budgeting example to show students how to incorporate price elasticity into financial analysis as an application of what students learn in their microeconomics course. They present simple as well as more advanced price-quantity relationships, and using various "what-if" scenarios; the authors show how risk…

This article describes a web-based application that can be used to help teach linear programming (LP) using an active learning approach in business courses such as management science and decision analysis. The software asks 42 integrated questions that guide students in creating product mix models and performing related analysis in Excel with…

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…