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SOME MORE INFO & FUN ABOUT OPERATIONS
Check this game:
Near
Beer Game
Harvard Business Review article:
Interview with Michael Dell
Story of Production in Dell Plants:
http://newsobserver.com/business/story/1981421p-8360690c.html
Article about mass customization:
Hewlett-Packard: The power of postponement
An article
explaning SixSigma implementation in a hospital
Famous
project failures (quite surprising facts,check the last one!)
The CHAOS Report: Some results about why many software
projects have failed
Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use Project Management!!
Some Case studies that show use of linear and integer
programming (and others):
Delta Airlines saves 300 million $ using
Linear Programming!
Continental Airlines uses LP too
Diet
Problem demo (You can optimize your diet!)
Benihana Resources
Recommended
Reading:
1. The Goal. Goldratt E. M. and Cox J. 1992. 2nd edition. North River Press.
2. Critical Chain. Goldratt E. M. 1997. North River Press.
These are business novels by Goldratt, they are very easy and fun reading and show some of the basic concepts that we will discuss in
class. You can find both in the library.
Some links for the examples that we mention in class.
Dell Story (from Accenture web site)
Dell Background Direct Model (from Dell website)
Some videos to see how goods are produced.
From
Stanford: How everyday things are made
(a library of product and process information)
http://manufacturing.stanford.edu/
The following
is a testimony to software failures and famous bugs...
Six people were overexposed during radiation treatments for cancer by Canada's Therac-25 radiation therapy machine. Three of these patients were believed to have died from the overdoses. The root cause was a lack of quality assurance, which lead to an over-complex, inadequately tested, under-documented system developed, and subsequently to the failure to take adequate corrective action. (Pooley & Stevens, 1999)
A succession of software engineering failures, especially in project management, caused 2 failures of London's (England) Ambulance dispatch system. The repair cost was estimated at £9m, but it is believed that people died who would not have died if ambulances had reached them as promptly as they would have done without the failures.
The Denver airport baggage handling system was so complex (involving 300 computers) that the development overrun prevented the airport from opening on time. Fixing the incredibly buggy system required an additional 50% of the original budget - nearly $200m.
Taurus, the planned automated transaction settlement system for the London Stock Exchange was canceled after 5 years of failed development. Losses are estimated at £75m for the project and £450m to customers. (Pooley & Stevens, 1999)
The Ariane 5 rocket exploded on its maiden flight in June [4], 1996 because the navigation package was inherited from the Ariane 4 without proper testing. The new rocket flew faster, resulting in larger values of some variables in the navigation software. Shortly after launch, an attempt to convert a 64-bit floating-point number into a 16-bit integer generated an overflow. The error was caught, but the code that caught it elected to shut down the subsystem. The rocket veered off course and exploded. It was unfortunate that the code that failed genereated inertial reference information useful only before lift-off; had it been turned off at the moment of launch, there would have been no trouble. (Kernighan, 1999)
Several E-mail systems suffer from a "buffer overflow error", when extremely long e-mail addresses are received. The internal buffers receiving the addresses do not check for length and allow their buffers to overflow causing the applications to crash. Hostile hackers use this fault to trick the computer into running a malicious program in its place.
A crew member of the guided-missile cruiser USS Yorktown mistakenly entered a zero for a data value, which resulted in a division by zero. The error cascaded and eventually shut down the ship's propulsion system. The ship was dead in the water for several hours because a program didn't check for valid input. (reported in Scientific American, November 1998)
The 125 million dollar Mars Climate Orbiter is assumed lost by officials at NASA. The failure responsible for loss of the orbiter is attributed to a failure of NASA’s system engineer process. The process did not specify the system of measurement to be used on the project. As a result, one of the development teams used Imperial measurement while the other used the metric system of measurement. When parameters from one module were passed to another during orbit navigation correct, no conversion was performed, resulting in the loss of the craft. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/orbiter/