Italy

See you on Friday

It is almost time to finish packing and get to the airport for the Florence summer study abroad program. There are answers to questions on the wiki, but if you have others, let me know. You can post a comment to the blog, a comment on the Question and Answers page on the wiki or email me directly.
I will take pictures of everyone over the weekend and update the participant pages (post your short bio if you haven’t already) and get them on the wiki so that we can all get to know each other more quickly.
For class on Monday, we will talk about how the course will operate (we’ll go over the blog and wiki a bit more) and we will also analyze (together) a couple of cases. I will post the cases on the wiki for you to read and will talk to the people at Palazzo Rucellai about hard copies. There may be a small charge for the cases and copying, but I’m not sure the exact amount yet. But there will be no book for the class, and the cost should not be very high.

Italy

Welcome Penn State students

All of the students that will be joining the program at Palazzo Rucellai should have received an email with instructions for accessing this blog and the class wiki. Contact me if you have not.

I am looking forward to meeting everyone next Friday. We should have a great time together in Italy.

Italy

Phones and traveling

I’ve added some information to the wiki site on the Florence Information page. There is a link to the PicCell Wireless web page for student rentals. (note that if you wait to buy a phone that you can use your US cell phone in “roaming” mode for quick, expensive calls in Europe.

There is also a link to the Italian train company, Trenitalia, and to a site that collects low cost airline route information.

Your assignment is to go to the Participants page for the class you’re in and leave a comment with a short biographical introduction for the rest of the class to read. And if you would like to go by a different name than the one I put on the site, let me know and I’ll change it.

And please feel free to leave comments on this blog, if you want. Comments are moderated, but I will post them as soon as I read through them. I do it this way because I don’t want spammers leaving comments here.

Italy

Meeting update

The business school is “full” on Friday, so the meeting from 2:00-4:00 will be in the Student Union. We can just pull a couple of tables together and talk there. See you there, or on Thursday in the School of Business cafe.

Note: both sessions are informal and you can come whenever you are free and stay as long as you want.

Italy

Questions and answers

The Study Abroad Office will have their orientation session for the summer on Monday at 4:00 in the big lecture hall underground between the ITE (engineering) building and the Library. If you have an exam or something, please concentrate on that and contact the Study Abroad office about getting the information you missed.
I will be at the front of the lecture hall starting around 3:30 and would love to say hi to everyone. My picture is on the business school website, if you want to know who to look for.
I will also run two information sessions in the School of Business Cafe later in the week.

Thursday, April 17, 4:00-6:00
Friday April 18, 2:00-4:00

These are not required or anything, since I will try to communicate anything important here and on the wiki. But it will be fun to meet all of you and have a chance to talk about the trip. Come to one if you have the chance.
One other thing: if you think of a question, go to the wiki, go to the Question & Answer page and post a comment on the page. I will keep an eye out, and then copy your question into the page and try to address your question.

Italy

Wiki & Blog updates

Keeping track of my new posts on this blog is pretty easy, and if you’re used to using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to this blog very easily.
For the wiki, if you click on “preferences” at the bottom, that will take you to a screen where you can change your password, but you can also choose to receive updates when changes are made (hourly, daily, weekly). When something changes, you’ll get an email, so I would probably choose the daily, if you want to get notifications.
I will be posting things as I get information (I just added to the Florence page some info about your flights, for example) so keep an eye on both of these sites.

Italy

Getting ready for Florence

Welcome to the students who are going on the Business in Florence program. There should be an email for you (sent to your uconn.edu address) with some information about the trip. Please take a look and respond to me so I know we are connected via email. There’s also some information about the wiki that we will use for the class.

modeling

I choose the BMW

Interesting experiment in fuel economy, pitting a compact hybrid versus a midsize sedan. I don’t know about the methodology, so I don’t know if the results are scientific (ie, repeatable), but it does indicate that there are many solutions to the problems we face.

What are the costs of settling for what seems to be a good solution quickly, if that leads you to miss an even better solution later on? Modeling business decisions can lead managers to stop looking after they’ve found the “optimal” solution, too.

modeling, spreadsheets

New Class for Fall 2008 Semester

I will be teaching a new class, OPIM 4895 Spreadsheet Modeling for Business Decision Making.

The class will focus on the techniques that businesses use to obtain a competitive advantage through analytics. The course will be based in Excel, to learn how the techniques work, and students will be able to translate the skills from the class to special-purpose tools that companies often use for particular problems.

Problem settings will span all of the functional business areas: operations (my background), finance and marketing, and there will be case work involved in the class to look at how analytic modeling fits into the business situation that requires decisions to be made. The right decision is always a function of the business strategy, which is why different companies “solve” problems in different ways (consider that Delta, Southwest and Skybus can all fly you from Hartford, but in very different ways).

Part of the class will focus on “optimization.” In these settings, we will try to represent complex decision settings where there are limits on what the decision maker can do. For example, suppose that as marketing manager, you have to allocate the money for a new product campaign across different channels (print, radio, television, web). What is the best use of the limited dollars? Or suppose you are trying to schedule people in a customer service center in such a way that their schedules are “attractive” and that customers get good service but also that the total cost is as low as possible.

We will also look at “decision analysis” where uncertainty about the world is only revealed after you must make your decision. Think about the poor person on Deal or No Deal, with everyone screaming different decisions. Is there a way to think about making “good” decisions? The answer is yes, by the way.

Part of the class will also be devoted to the increasing use of simulation in business. Older techniques use “scenarios” to evaluate a business decision in the face of different possible outcomes (interest rates rise by some amount, decrease by some amount, stay flat). Within a spreadsheet model, it is possible to create models that can sample thousands of possible scenarios and reveal the patterns of how the business works in those different scenarios. In much the same way that a pilot uses a simulator to practice landing in different weather situations, simulation can be used by businesses to “try out” different strategies against possible future scenarios to better understand how to proceed. Risk analysis is quite often done in this way for financial planning.

Please feel free to email me if you have other questions about the class.