The Wall Street Journal (May 26-27, 2012) reviews a fascinating new book by Duke U. Professor Dan Ariely called “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty“. The essence is why normal everyday people (and, of course, students) cheat and lie. It turns out that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. The purpose of locks, says one locksmith,” is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.”
Ariely found many reasons why students might cheat. A common one was having another student in the room who was clearly cheating. Watching a mini-Madoff cheat on a test encouraged the remaining students to also do so. Cheating, it seems, is infectious.
Does the prospect of flunking or other punishment make a student less likely to cheat ? “It may have a small effect on our behavior,” says Ariely, ”but it is probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of ‘I’m only fudging a little’ or ‘Everyone does it’ .”
So what can we as instructors do? Here are Ariely’s suggestions: (1) Just before a quiz or assignment, tell students to recall the Ten Commandments. In his experiment doing so, Ariely found cheating dropped to zero! The same happened when he reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools’ honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments. (2) Having students sign a vow not to cheat at the top of the exam, rather than the bottom, likewise decreased cheating. While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on students, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.
(Note: My own prosaic advise: (1) Don’t leave the room during a quiz or exam and (2) Use MyOMLab with algorithmic assignments so each student works with a different data set.)
Guest Post: The History of Supply Chain Management
OM in the News: The Shipping Revolution
Fortune (May 21, 2012) carries a fascinating analysis of the global shipping industry that fits nicely into a discussion of logistics in Chapter 11. We find in the article that nearly 90% of all goods traded across borders travel at some point by sea.The fastest growing routes are between ports in Asia, accounting for 43% of all maritime trade., with the most heavily 
trafficked route being between China and the US West Coast. Unfortunately for the trade deficit, 4 times as many goods travel to the US than make the return trip. New, faster routes are opening with the Northeast and Northwest Passages ice-free every summer since 2008.
The real revolution has been in the ships themselves. Back in the 1956-1970 era, cargo vessels were 443 feet long and hauled 500 twenty-foot “equivalent container units” (called TEUs). Next year, Maersk, the Danish shipping giant, will launch its EEE-Class, the largest cargo ship in history. Length: 1,312 feet. capacity: 18,000 TEUs. Cost: $190 million/ship.
As ships have gotten bigger, economies of scale have improved, and the cost of shipping has dropped dramatically. Here are some typical ocean-crossing costs: TV, $10; DVD player, $1.50; vacuum cleaner, $1; barrel of oil, 80 cents; 6-pack of beer, 6 cents; 100 pounds of coffee, $6.80. (Oil, grain, and iron are more expensive because ships make the return trip empty.)
And the containers themselves are no longer just a steel box. They have doubled to 40 feet, and are often fitted with RFID chips to let ports and owners keep track of them. Some containers are built to be folded up when empty. Others can float if lost at sea and come with GPS satellites to make them easier to find in the ocean.
Discussion questions:
1. Why are the ships getting bigger and bigger?
2. What are the dangers facing the shipping industry?
OM in the News: 3M’s “Hairball” Supply Chain
3M’s Command picture-hanging hooks, made of plastic and strips of sticky foam, don’t look complicated. The Wall Street Journal (May 17, 2012) reports, though, that until recently, the Command production process meandered more than 1,300 miles through 4 factories in 4 states.
3M’s recently retired CEO branded such convoluted production trails as “hairballs.” The man in charge of untangling, John Woodworth, 3M’s Supply Chain VP, characterizes the situation this way. “We had long supply chains. It was and continues to be an issue.”
Every company tries to streamline manufacturing and supplier networks, of course. But few have a task as daunting as Mr. Woodworth’s. 3M makes 65,000 products, ranging from Scotch tape to film for solar-energy panels, dental braces and dog chews. They are produced in 214 plants in 41 countries. Mr. Woodworth, a 38-year veteran of 3M, figures he has been inside half of those plants.
3M’s long-term plan is to have fewer, larger, more efficient plants, and spread them out around the world. More production will be done in what 3M calls “super hubs,” plants capable of making scores of products for a region of the world. 3M now has 10 hubs, including six in the U.S. and one each in Singapore, Japan, Germany and Poland. It plans at least six more, all outside the U.S.
3M’s stethoscopes, for example, used to be made in steps involving 14 outside contractors and three 3M plants. Now all processes are being brought into a plant in Columbia, Mo. The cycle time will fall to 50 days from 165. The company’s goal is to reduce cycle times—the period needed to go from ordering raw materials to delivering finished goods—by 25%.
Discussion questions:
1. Why did the 3M production process become so complicated?
2. Why is cycle time such an important OM concept?
OM in the News: Pink Slime and Lean Hospitals
The public is continually subjected to health-related scares, from food packaging to water bottles that contain BPA, a chemical that has been linked to cancer. The media also highlights food additives that are not really harmful, but just sound unappetizing, such as “pink slime” in ground beef and the use of dried insects to color beverages at Starbucks. Yet, according to The Reporter (May 10, 2012), our nation’s hospitals are the one place where people actually have the most reasons to be scared and to demand change.
Studies estimate that 100,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors and another 100,000 die as the result of hospital-acquired infections. This health-care safety problem can be tackled with the OM tools of lean and TQM. We see this in one of our text’s most popular video case studies, “The Culture of Quality at Arnold Palmer Hospital”– worth showing when teaching Chapter 6.
The good news is that a growing number of hospitals are dramatically reducing different types of preventable errors, including patient falls, bedsores, wrong-site surgeries and medication mistakes, using the principles of lean (Chapter 16). Dr. Richard Shannon helped his Pittsburgh hospital achieve, in just 90 days, a 95 percent reduction in deaths caused by central-line-associated blood-stream infections–through improved teamwork and making sure the correct supplies are always readily available. Because these improvements do not rely on expensive technology or years of specialized training, they can be replicated in any hospital.
A 2010 survey, however, shows the bad news–that most hospitals are not devoting time or resources to prevent central-line infections, which claim 30,000 lives annually. And these hospital-acquired infections cost the U.S. about $30 billion a year in unnecessary medical expenses.
Discussion questions:
1. What OM tools in Chapter 6 can be applied to help prevent infections in hospitals?
2. After watching the video, what does Arnold Palmer Hospital do to maintain quality?
The latest MIT Sloan Management Review (May 15, 2012) reports on consumer products giant Kimberly Clark’s efforts towards sustainability, an important topic in our OM courses 
(Chapter 7). The 140 year old company (57,000 employees in 36 countries)has more than a billion people use its products (which include Kleenex, Huggies, and Kotex) every day!
The company has had 4 global five-year goals, looking at energy reduction and energy efficiency, water use reduction and efficiency gains. For 2000, it addressed chemical issues. For 2005, it addressed packaging, and had a 10% reduction in weight in packaging goal. For 2010, it looked at lifecycle analysis of all product initiatives. For 2015, the focus is broader– on people, the planet and products. “That equates to the social, environmental and economic pillars of sustainability. That’s the triple bottom line for us,” says Peggy Ward, director of sustainability.
“On the planet side, we’re still following our traditional focus on energy, waste and water,” she adds, ”but we’re pushing ourselves even further. So, we’ve set an absolute greenhouse gas reduction goal of 5%. On the water side, our goal is a 25% reduction in water use. And in waste, our goal is to achieve zero manufacturing waste sent to landfill. About 48% of our mills are landfill-free currently.”
New products at Kimberly Clark include Scott Naturals Tube Free– bath tissue rolls that do not have that cardboard core ( meaning you can use every single sheet of the roll.) The amount of waste that will be eliminated that’s going to landfills is large — basically it’s enough to go to the moon and back two times. Huggies Pure and Natural diapers have a component that has a renewable alternative material in it — instead of a petrochemical-based input. It has organic cotton, it’s fragrance-free and dye-free and it has 20% post-consumer recycled content.
This is a good article to share with your class when you are discussing sustainability.
As we discuss in Chapter 6, quality can take on a wide range of attributes. For auto makers, and their customers, these attributes range from safety, to the choice of interior materials, to the way parts fit together—all of which affect perceptions of a brand. The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 2012) reports the bad news for Chrysler–that through bailouts and bankruptcy, there is one liability that the automaker hasn’t yet managed to shed: its reputation for lousy quality. “You can lose your reputation in a year, but it takes five to 10 years to rebuild it,” says the director of the Consumer Reports.
Despite surging sales, the auto maker remains dogged by a long trail of recalls, customer complaints and poor ratings on quality surveys. In 2008, the London Times proclaimed Chrysler’s now-discontinued Sebring “almost certainly the worst car in the entire world.” The Journal quotes Chrysler’s quality chief, Doug Betts, as saying: ”We were building cars that were functional, and other than that, they were boxes you got into that hopefully kept the rain off your head.”
But today, dealers, customers and independent reviewers say Chrysler’s efforts are starting to pay off, with better finishes and higher quality scores on new models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV and 300 sedan. Last year, the brands earned their highest ratings in years in Consumer Reports’ annual reliability survey, rising from the bottom of the pack to the middle. That year, Betts used his new authority to delay a restyled Chrysler 300 after inspection of a prototype found a right rear tail light that wasn’t flush with the body. The one-millimeter projection was hardly visible, Betts said, but it was enough to “catch a rag if someone was hand-washing” the car.
Discussion questions:
1. Why is a quality reputation easy to lose, but hard to gain?
2. What caused Chrysler’s reputation to drop?
Dr. Wende Huehn-Brown, at St. Petersburg College, provides her Guest Post today on the interesting subject of discussion boards.
With students retaining less than 20% of what we may say in a physical class, figuring out a communication system to reinforce key concepts can be vital to learning. In MyOMlab there are tools for real-time communications such as Chat and ClassLive, as well as traditional email communication tools. This guest blog will focus on how a Discussion Board may be used.
Two years ago, I read “Weblog Technology for Instruction, Learning, and Information Delivery” ( by J.P. Shim and C. Guo, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, Jan., 2009). The authors showed how discussion boards can be used in a Learning Management System (LMS). This was kind of a light bulb moment for me and led to rethinking how I create discussion boards. According to B.W. Dearstyne’s article “Blogs, The New Information Revolution?” ( Information Management Journal, 2005), boards are a “… means of collecting and organizing fresh insights and opinions … fostering knowledge and information sharing as a way of enhancing productivity”. Doing a blog outside the LMS can further enhance connectivity to other people, organizations, other classes, etc.
I originally started with further discussion of key concepts and case questions in the lesson. This often extended into service management and integrating other disciplines (such as marketing and finance) through adaptive learning concepts, and to providing further tips on completing submissions (i.e., additional tutorials, as I have quite a few students that struggle with math). There is further peer-to-peer learning that provides a perception of personalized learning and interaction with the profession. My discussion boards have evolved to include Frequently Asked Questions on assignments to help students in an open format–especially those students that seem to fear asking questions. Additionally, I share events going on; either local ones they can attend (i.e. competitions, scholarships, professional organization networking, etc.) or news stories relative to the lessons (thanks, Jay and Barry … I often use your OM blog).
Students frequently comment positively on the way discussion boards work in this class. What are your creative ways to use discussion boards?
The Vancouver Sun (May 7,2012) has just reported another outbreak of infection rates at Canadian hospitals. The article states that health authorities have been warned for 10 years 
or more that the outsourcing of hospital cleaners – key personnel in any infection prevention and control program – was a misguided attempt to save money and would put patients at risk. In 2004, incidents at Surrey Memorial Hospital concluded that infection prevention had completely broken down. An auditor-general’s 2007 review found that the ministry of health had failed to implement systems for the prevention and control of infection.
Things heated up in 2009 when Vancouver released reports from its Centre for Disease Control (CDC) on a persistent and lethal infection out-break at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, the third in four years. The CDC found that: “There were insufficient numbers of cleaning staff to meet the basic daily needs of the facility and they were not adequately trained in appropriate cleaning procedures for a health care facility. They were not able to meet the increased demand for environmental cleaning that is required to control an outbreak.”
Best practices in infection prevention programs highlight the vital role of hospital cleaning: adequate staffing and training, proper equipment and supplies, and real communication and cooperation among hospital personnel at all levels. None of these factors are included in the government-ordered cleaning audits (which were confined to visual inspections only) that report hospitals passing with flying colors even while infection outbreaks were raging.
Scotland banned the outsourcing of hospital housekeeping in 2008 and brought cleaning back in house. The result? Infection cases have dropped dramatically. Reviews of Ontario’s devastating 2003 SARS outbreak named hospital cleanliness as a critical component in preventing and containing infections, and hospital cleaners’ involvement essential.
Discussion questions:
1. Why are janitorial services successfully outsourced in most organizations, but not here?
2. What OM tools are available to address this quality issue?
OM in the News: Queuing Up at Heathrow
The great unknown for international travel: How long will I have to wait at immigration when I arrive? At Bangkok’s airport, it can be 2 hours. At New York’s JFK, its 
23 minutes at 3 am, but 37 minutes at 5 am. And at London’s Heathrow, 25% of non-EEU passengers wait more than 45 minutes. (Heathrow’s target that 95% of passengers clear with 45 minutes was breached at least 107 times during the 1st 2 weeks in April).
The Wall Street Journal (May 5-6, 2012) reports that the biggest cause of long delays is that arriving flights aren’t spaced out evenly, and that there aren’t always enough border agents to process long lines when arrivals are clumped together. ”It’s simply a matter of a saturated queue, and you solve that with either more servers or shorter processing time,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Prof. Alfred Blumstein.
Since shorter processing times could mean less attention paid to security checks to keep illegal migrants or terrorists from crossing borders, airports need to add more agents to minimize wait times. Part of the challenge with staffing, of course, is that demand for passport checks varies widely throughout the day. “We know at times queues have been too long,” says a Heathrow spokesman. He said the agency is adding 80 agents at peak times, and 480 during this summer’s Olympics.
With budgets tight, however, expanding the workforce can be difficult. Prof. Blumstein, for example, who waited for over an hour at Heathrow two weeks ago, suggested moving people sooner from the main queue into shorter lines before each desk to “shorten the dead time.” As we teach in Module D, however, if the person already at the desk takes longer than average to clear, this can increase the overall average time in queue. That can lead to frustration if others who were further behind in the queue get served first.
Discussion questions:
1. Identify which queuing model Heathrow uses now.
2. How can you improve on Blumstein’s suggestion?
