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Operations Management Case Studies

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• 01 Apr 2024
• In Practice

Navigating the Mood of Customers Weary of Price Hikes

Price increases might be tempering after historic surges, but companies continue to wrestle with pinched consumers. Alexander MacKay, Chiara Farronato, and Emily Williams make sense of the economic whiplash of inflation and offer insights for business leaders trying to find equilibrium.

• 22 Mar 2024
• Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

Many companies build their businesses on open source software, code that would cost firms $8.8 trillion to create from scratch if it weren't freely available. Research by Frank Nagle and colleagues puts a value on an economic necessity that will require investment to meet demand.

• 27 Feb 2024
• Cold Call Podcast

How Could Harvard Decarbonize Its Supply Chain?

Harvard University aims to be fossil-fuel neutral by 2026 and totally free of fossil fuels by 2050. As part of this goal, the university is trying to decarbonize its supply chain and considers replacing cement with a low-carbon substitute called Pozzotive®, made with post-consumer recycled glass. A successful pilot project could jump start Harvard’s initiative to reduce embodied carbon emissions, but it first needs credible information about the magnitude and validity of potential carbon reductions. Harvard Business School professor emeritus Robert Kaplan and assistant professor Shirley Lu discuss the flow of emissions along the supply chain of Harvard University’s construction projects, the different methods of measuring carbon emissions, including the E-liability approach, and the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to facilitate the flow of comparable and reliable emissions information in the case, “Harvard University and Urban Mining Industries: Decarbonizing the Supply Chain.”

• 02 Jan 2024

10 Trends to Watch in 2024

Employees may seek new approaches to balance, even as leaders consider whether to bring more teams back to offices or make hybrid work even more flexible. These are just a few trends that Harvard Business School faculty members will be following during a year when staffing, climate, and inclusion will likely remain top of mind.

• 12 Dec 2023

COVID Tested Global Supply Chains. Here’s How They’ve Adapted

A global supply chain reshuffling is underway as companies seek to diversify their distribution networks in response to pandemic-related shocks, says research by Laura Alfaro. What do these shifts mean for American businesses and buyers?

• 25 Apr 2023

How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model

The platforms SHEIN and Temu match consumer demand and factory output, bringing Chinese production to the rest of the world. The companies have remade fast fashion, but their pioneering approach has the potential to go far beyond retail, says John Deighton.

• 21 Apr 2023

The $15 Billion Question: Have Loot Boxes Turned Video Gaming into Gambling?

Critics say loot boxes—major revenue streams for video game companies—entice young players to overspend. Can regulators protect consumers without dampening the thrill of the game? Research by Tomomichi Amano and colleague.

• 11 Apr 2023

A Rose by Any Other Name: Supply Chains and Carbon Emissions in the Flower Industry

Headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya, Sian Flowers exports roses to Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian and its distributors used international air cargo to transport them to Amsterdam, where they were sold at auction and trucked to markets across Europe. But when the Covid-19 pandemic caused huge increases in shipping costs, Sian launched experiments to ship roses by ocean using refrigerated containers. The company reduced its costs and cut its carbon emissions, but is a flower that travels halfway around the world truly a “low-carbon rose”? Harvard Business School professors Willy Shih and Mike Toffel debate these questions and more in their case, “Sian Flowers: Fresher by Sea?”

• 28 Mar 2023

The FDA’s Speedy Drug Approvals Are Safe: A Win-Win for Patients and Pharma Innovation

Expediting so-called breakthrough therapies has saved millions of dollars in research time without compromising drug safety or efficacy, says research by Ariel Stern, Amitabh Chandra, and colleagues. Could policymakers harness the approach to bring life-saving treatments to the market faster?

• 31 Jan 2023

Addressing Racial Discrimination on Airbnb

For years, Airbnb gave hosts extensive discretion to accept or reject a guest after seeing little more than a name and a picture, believing that eliminating anonymity was the best way for the company to build trust. However, the apartment rental platform failed to track or account for the possibility that this could facilitate discrimination. After research published by Professor Michael Luca and others provided evidence that Black hosts received less in rent than hosts of other races and showed signs of discrimination against guests with African American sounding names, the company had to decide what to do. In the case, “Racial Discrimination on Airbnb,” Luca discusses his research and explores the implication for Airbnb and other platform companies. Should they change the design of the platform to reduce discrimination? And what’s the best way to measure the success of any changes?

• 29 Nov 2022

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

Economic worries will make pricing strategy even more critical this holiday season. Research by Chiara Farronato reveals the value that hip consumers see in hard-to-find products. Are companies simply making too many goods?

• 18 Oct 2022

Chewy.com’s Make-or-Break Logistics Dilemma

In late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and then-CEO of online pet products retailer Chewy.com, was facing a decision that could determine his company’s future. Should he stay with a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for all of Chewy.com’s e-commerce fulfillment or take that function in house? Cohen was convinced that achieving scale would be essential to making the business work and he worried that the company’s current 3PL may not be able to scale with Chewy.com’s projected growth or maintain the company’s performance standards for service quality and fulfillment. But neither he nor his cofounders had any experience managing logistics, and the company’s board members were pressuring him to leave order fulfillment to the 3PL. They worried that any changes could destabilize the existing 3PL relationship and endanger the viability of the fast-growing business. What should Cohen do? Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Rayport discusses the options in his case, “Chewy.com (A).”

• 12 Oct 2022

When Design Enables Discrimination: Learning from Anti-Asian Bias on Airbnb

Airbnb bookings dropped 12 percent more for hosts with Asian names than other hosts during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, says research by Michael Luca. Could better design deter bias, particularly during times of crisis?

• 22 Aug 2022

Can Amazon Remake Health Care?

Amazon has disrupted everything from grocery shopping to cloud computing, but can it transform health care with its One Medical acquisition? Amitabh Chandra discusses company's track record in health care and the challenges it might face.

• 12 Jul 2022

Can the Foodservice Distribution Industry Recover from the Pandemic?

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, US Foods struggled, as restaurant and school closures reduced demand for foodservice distribution. The situation improved after the return of indoor dining and in-person learning, but an industry-wide shortage of truck drivers and warehouse staff hampered the foodservice distributor’s post-pandemic recovery. That left CEO Pietro Satriano to determine the best strategy to attract and retain essential workers, even as he was tasked with expanding the wholesale grocery store chain (CHEF’STORE) that US Foods launched during the pandemic lockdown. Harvard Business School Professor David E. Bell explores how post-pandemic supply chain challenges continue to affect the foodservice distribution industry in his case, “US Foods: Driving Post-Pandemic Success?”

• 05 Jul 2022
• What Do You Think?

Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?

Toyota and other companies have harnessed just-in-time inventory management to cut logistics costs and boost service. That is, until COVID-19 roiled global supply chains. Will we ever get back to the days of tighter inventory control? asks James Heskett. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 05 May 2022

Why Companies Raise Their Prices: Because They Can

Markups on household items started climbing years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies have realized just how much consumers will pay for the brands they love, says research by Alexander MacKay. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

• 31 Mar 2022

Navigating the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ in Professional Services

Not all companies need to scale. Ashish Nanda explores a crucial choice that leaders of professional services firms face as their organizations grow. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 28 Feb 2022

How Racial Bias Taints Customer Service: Evidence from 6,000 Hotels

Hotel concierges provide better service to white customers than Black and Asian customers, says research by Alexandra Feldberg and colleague. They offer three strategies to help companies detect bias on the front line. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 10 Feb 2022

Why Are Prices So High Right Now—and Will They Ever Return to Normal?

And when will sold-out products return to store shelves? The answers aren't so straightforward. Research by Alberto Cavallo probes the complex interplay of product shortages, prices, and inflation. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Building operational excellence in higher education

When colleges and universities think about building academic enterprises for the 21st century, they often overlook one of the most critical aspects: the back-office structures needed to run complex organizations. By failing to modernize and streamline administrative functions (including HR, finance, and facilities), universities put themselves at a serious disadvantage, making it harder to fulfill their academic missions.

Take faculty recruitment and retention. The perceived level of the administrative burden is often a major factor in the attractiveness of an academic job offer. In 2018, the administrative burden on productive research faculty was measured at 44 percent of their workload (up from 42 percent in 2012). 1 Sandra Schneider, “Results of the 2018 FDP faculty workload survey: Input for optimizing time on active research,” Federal Demonstration Partnership, January 2019, thefdp.org. For faculty members, the prospect of moving to an institution where they would have a lighter administrative load is a huge selling point, since “institutional procedures and red tape” ranks as one of the top five sources of stress. 2 Ellen Bara Stolzenberg et al., “Undergraduate teaching faculty: The HERI faculty survey 2016-2017,” Higher Education Research Institute, February 2019, heri.ucla.edu. Something similar happens with students: studies show that the need to jump through administrative hoops is an important driver of “summer melt,” when students admitted to a school fail to matriculate for the upcoming year. 3 Emily Arnim, “Why summer melt happens—and how to freeze it,” EAB, April 30, 2019, eab.com.

Outdated and ineffective administrative operations can have more direct effects on an institution’s reputation. Financial fraud, ineffective or unfair personnel practices, and grants lost as a result of poor research administration can all lead to negative press reports—or worse. The 115-year-old College of New Rochelle, in New Rochelle, NY, recently closed its doors after fraud decimated its finances and reputation, making any chance of recovery impossible. 4 Dave Zucker, “As College of New Rochelle closes, Mercy steps in to take on displaced students,” Westchester Magazine , March 5, 2019, westchestermagazine.com.

A vast challenge

In our experience, most colleges and universities that set out to improve their administrative operations fail to meet their stated goals and in some cases take a step backward. There are several reasons, many relating to the unique constraints of academic institutions:

• Starting from the top down. Universities are essentially confederations of departments and functions, each with its own internal organization and power structure. Rather than gathering input and alignment from these constituencies, many new administrative plans are run centrally and fail to gain traction.
• Putting the answer before the problem. Another common pitfall is starting with a solution and looking for ways to solve a problem for that answer rather than doing the work needed to gain a deep understanding of the problem on the ground and building a solution collaboratively with stakeholders.
• Focusing on dollars rather than sense. Other change programs flounder because they focus primarily on cost savings rather than on improving service levels or the experience of the administrative staff.

A failed program is more than just a loss of time and money. By raising the expectations of faculty and staff and then failing to follow through on them, such failures stoke resentment and make it harder for future programs to gain traction.

While improving administrative operations remains a vast challenge for many universities, a few are taking a new approach—and posting meaningful results. In some cases, institutions that transformed their back offices have managed to halve the time needed to hire new staff or have reduced wasteful procurement transactions by more than 50 percent.

A new approach for a university in gridlock: A case study

A major public research university knew it had reached the breaking point. Its outdated administrative operations were holding it back on several fronts. Slow response times, red tape, and time-consuming administrative tasks had generated resentment and frustration among faculty. Some had already left for other universities, citing a lack of support for research administration, an inability to hire critical lab staff in less than six months, and difficulty keeping labs stocked with supplies.

Part of the problem was that no one seemed to be accountable. The schools and other units blamed the central administration. Central staff, meanwhile, thought the schools and units weren’t doing their part. In this stalemate, nothing got fixed.

Things only got worse when university leaders decided to create a shared-services effort intended to deliver multimillion-dollar savings. When frustrated deans and faculty heard about the effort, they made it clear that any plan conceived without their input would not have their support. With no resolution in sight, and core functions such as hiring and procurement in jeopardy, university leaders realized they needed to find a new approach.

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Rethinking administrative operations from the ground up.

The leadership realized that instead of once again creating a solution they would then impose on a diverse system, they had to understand the problems from the point of view of the various stakeholders and then design targeted fixes. With that fundamentally different perspective, the change team created a carefully thought out road map and began the hard work of redesigning systems and processes:

• The first step was a listening tour to hear directly from faculty and staff on the problems they encountered. What were their pain points? Where exactly were the bottlenecks? The team got unvarnished feedback. From the director of a research center: “We had to hire temporary employees just to complete our normal tasks because the hiring time is so slow.” From a dean: “The university felt like it was in gridlock.”
• Next, the change team convened a group of design teams, made up of members from both the schools and the central staff, to break down the problems, reimagine the processes from a blank sheet of paper, and implement changes.
• The team started the redesign process with two specific initial goals: reducing the time needed to hire administrative staff from an average of more than 80 days to 45 days and reducing the number of procurement vouchers—tens of thousands of them—that wasted thousands of hours of staff time and failed to capture the right data.
• As the team worked through each service, it followed a fast, structured process, designing new solutions in about two months, piloting them for two to three months, and then rolling them out to the campus in waves of schools and units over the following six months.

The results were unequivocal: time to hire fell by 46 percent for nonfaculty positions, and improper procurement (measured by the volume of unnecessary vouchers) fell by 57 percent (Exhibit 1).

So far, the improvement in hiring time has had significant downstream effects. For example, 96 percent of hiring managers report acceptances by their first-choice candidates. In the past, many first choices had dropped out of the process to pursue other opportunities as their names sat in the queue during the months-long hiring process. Just as important, the change team created a community of faculty, staff, and academic leaders who fully embraced the new ways of working. Over the course of the redesign effort, the process involved more than 400 staff and faculty, held more than 50 listening sessions, convened more than 30 design workshops, and generated a list of dozens of initiatives to pursue in the future (Exhibit 2).

The team is currently pursuing transformational initiatives in research administration, travel, student-worker support, and academic personnel. Its ambitions are equally transformative. For example, its goal in research administration is to cut the time to set up awards in half. This collaborative, bottom-up process led many staff members to tell the leadership that “this feels different” from previous change efforts.

Understanding the elements of success

A few key elements helped make a big difference.

Involve faculty and staff as true collaborators. Don’t drive the change from the central administration down to schools and units. Instead, raise the quality and adoption rate of operational solutions by converting faculty and staff from sideline observers into true collaborators. Start with listening to end users, understanding the obstacles they face, and jointly identifying where and how the current system fails them. In that way, a university can bypass the tendency to consider overarching organizational solutions and focus on solving the actual problems at hand.

Have central administrators work side by side with employees of schools or units. For creating solutions, a partnership between the central administration and the faculty and staff of schools or units is even more critical. It is essential to develop solutions by having representatives from schools and units work together with central staff. Besides gaining a deeper understanding of the problems by including these stakeholders, leaders can begin to convert possible naysayers among faculty and staff into allies.

Focus on the university’s mission. While efficiencies and cost savings are important, they are notoriously hard to capture and reinvest. In addition, any sense that the real goal is to cut costs is unlikely to build internal allies among faculty and staff who already feel undersupported. Instead, leaders should communicate a message of improved service levels that can help further the university’s academic and community-impact missions.

Transformation 101: How universities can overcome financial headwinds to focus on their mission

Show an impact early. There’s a saying that nothing succeeds like success. By starting with one or two services that can be improved quickly and showing an impact within six months, leaders can build belief in the effort. Winning over skeptical constituents will make the rest of it move forward more easily.

Invest in a continuous-improvement team. Staff volunteers committing many hours a week on top of their day jobs can’t sustain changes and expand into other areas of the university entirely by themselves. Creating a small team dedicated to executing transformation initiatives across administrative functions can help accelerate and sustain the momentum for change across the university. A high-functioning team will have a catalog of services (such as training, facilitation, and full-on process redesign) that helps it tailor its support to the specific details of a given problem.

Focus on a transformational rather than incremental impact. Redesigning administrative operations across a university is a big effort. Leaders should take full advantage of the opportunity by thinking about a total transformation, not incremental change. Typical efforts aim for a 20 percent improvement. When leaders set their sights on improvements of more than 50 percent, they can free themselves from the status quo. That magnitude of change will force the change team to start with a truly blank slate and to reimagine a dramatically improved future one.

Taking an important step in transforming a university

A final insight: the work this university did enabled leaders of the administrative functions to shift their sights beyond fighting fires to the truly strategic parts of their work. The progress on hiring, for example, helped surface the challenges the university faces in attracting and retaining talent—particularly underrepresented minority faculty. Furthermore, conversations about improving the performance of the administrative functions highlighted the aspirations of leaders and staff to use machine learning, automation, and other advanced techniques in their work.

Although administrative operations are often overlooked, efficient and effective ones can lead to much broader changes. When universities can hire the high-potential candidates they seek, eliminate wasted time of faculty and staff, and unlock the power of data, they can catapult ahead in their ability to meet their educational and research missions.

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Suhrid Gajendragadkar is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office, where Ted Rounsaville is an associate partner and Jason Wright is a partner; Duwain Pinder is a consultant in the New Jersey office.

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I will uses the case studies for the course and have given the details to our library to order. The cases are very good. Thanks, Qeis Kamran

First of all I'd like to say this book is an excellent book in the field, as cases books for academic education are very rare. But the only reason why I did not adopt is because that this book needs updating. The latest version was published in 2006 and a lot has happended in the field since then.

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Chapter 1. Developing World-Class Operations

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Case study: operations management - indiana university kelley school of business, digital product in use:.

Connect® Operations Management

Course Name:

P371 Operations & Supply Chain Management

Course Type:

Credit hours:, textbook in use:.

Operations and Supply Chain Management with Service Management and Connect by F. Robert Jacobs, 14e

Instructor Name:

Peggy Daniels Lee

Enrollment:

60 students per section

500 students/year (university total)

Case Study Term:

Fall 2012/Spring 2013 (without Connect )

Fall 2013/Spring 2014 (with Connect )

“I no longer have to cover material that everyone seems to already understand.”

-peggy daniels lee, connect/smartbook requires students to read and engage with course content.

Connect/SmartBook helps Professor Lee engage more students with in-class learning activities and provide feedback more quickly on homework assignments. Because students are required to complete SmartBook modules that cover the assigned textbook readings, students are better prepared during classroom lecture to engage with the material. This student preparation allows Lee the opportunity to delve more deeply into the course content because she no longer has to lecture about what students were supposed to have read in their textbooks. Now, she is able to review students’ completed homework assignments in Connect/SmartBook and incorporate areas where students may have struggled with concepts into her classroom activities. Connect/SmartBook’s automatic grading tools help Lee save time on administrative duties so she does have time to develop more concept driven learning opportunities in class.

Institution Profile

The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University has more than 100 years of excellence in business education and is one of the top ranked universities for business graduates in the country. Over 7,500 students enroll in undergraduate, MBA, graduate, and doctoral programs to engage in an innovative curriculum that teaches personal development and teamwork with an emphasis on global and social responsibility

Implementation

Course Description:

Operations and Supply Chain Management is concerned with the design, planning, and control of productive activities of any business. This course examines the fundamentals of operations management in both manufacturing and service industries.

Course Grade

The grade is determined by: Exams (45%) Connect Homework (7%); SmartBook (14%); Offline Homework (2%); In-Class Exercises/Quizzes (12%); Semester Team Project (20%).

Implementation of McGraw-Hill Connect

Professor Lee’s primary challenges were twofold: for the students, getting the students to read the textbook and prepare with the material prior to coming to class; and, for herself, providing quick feedback on homework assignments for a growing number of students.

Connect helped solve both challenges. “We adopted Connect primarily for the SmartBook modules: 14 SmartBook modules are assigned to coincide with the students’ readings, and Connect allows me to automate my homework assignments so that students receive feedback immediately.”

Students who complete the SmartBook modules receive 10 points, while five points are deducted if the modules are not completed. This point incentive impresses upon the students how important the readings are to understanding the material.

Lee also uses Connect for homework assignments. She assigns two homework assignments each week, covering one to two chapters with a maximum of 10 questions taken from the test bank for the textbook.

Through Connect , students may check their progress in the course, access the SmartBook , and contact the instructor with questions.

To help students understand how the class was structured, Lee explains Connect/SmartBook modules on the first day of class. She also posts a page on the LMS with “Hints” that students can refer to frequently because the students tended not to go back and look at the instructional powerpoint slides.

Lee uses the Connect reports – Assignment Results, Student Performance, and Item Analysis – to help her understand the problems the students are having so that she can adjust her lecture for the next class. She uses the Student Performance report specifically to see how much time students devote in SmartBook to complete the homework; this data is especially useful for settling grade disputes.

Results Achieved

Since implementing Connect/SmartBook , Lee is pleased that “more students are actually reading the material and come to class prepared. I have fewer ‘blank stares.’” As a result, she enjoys being able to delve deeper into topics during her lectures and looks forward to including more interactive exercises in class. Prior to using Connect/SmartBook , Lee spent 4 hours prepping for lecture and about three-quarters an hour a week on active learning opportunities for her students (Figure 1). Since implementing Connect/ SmartBook , Lee is able to spend six hours a week prepping for lecture and three hours a week creating active learning opportunities for her classes. She reviews the students’ homework prior to class and then adapts the lecture and in-class work to topics and concepts with which the students are struggling. “I no longer cover material that everyone seems to already understand.”

Lee comments, “Prior to using Connect and SmartBoo k, I was usually forced to reiterate material because most students hadn’t read it. With Connect and SmartBook , I spend time in class briefly reviewing the topic, working problems, and doing in-class exercises that help students to apply the material.” She gets to spend less time lecturing and more time going over problems and answering questions about the homework. She appreciates that she and her students have more time to apply and engage with the concepts in class.

Numerous potential benefits brought her to Connect . For one thing, she wanted students to have faster grade feedback. "It took me 7 to 10 days to grade student work and give feedback when I had to manually grade." Lee also wanted each student to be able to do their own work without feeling pressured to share their responses with other students. In a paper-based assignment, she points out, 'group homework' often resulted in students asking each other, 'Did you finish the homework? Can I see what you did?'

Additionally, she wanted students to have the opportunity to make multiple attempts to solve a question correctly. With the manual method of grading, she says, "It's not feasible for me to give feedback on what was done wrong and give them another chance." With Connect, students would be able to practice and that, she says, is critical to learn formulas and processes.

Lee wanted more flexibility in her assignments. With Connect she is able to assign more problems within a specific set of questions to better challenge students in areas where they need it. Lee aimed to enable her students to click a link that would show them either hints, or where to find the information they need, in the textbook. That function would make it as easy as possible for a student to push through the assignment on their own.

Finally, she wanted a system that would bring students to her classroom better prepared. Only a small fraction of students read the textbook before class, she points out, "so I felt limited in what I could cover in class. If they don't have any exposure to the material, it's hard to have a meaningful discussion."

" SmartBook was a brilliant solution," she says. "Assigning points for reading the textbook and answering questions about it is an absolute no-brainer."

Implementation

Course grade is determined by the following: 18% – SmartBook 12% – Connect chapter assignments 10% – In-class quizzes 60% – Exams

For each class semester, Lee assigns eleven chapters from SmartBook . All reading assignments are due before the chapter is covered in class. She tailors the chapter coverage based on what will be featured in exams, so she doesn't assign all sections. At the end of the semester, Lee drops each student's two lowest SmartBook scores. She finds that 95 percent of students earn full credit for SmartBook , meaning they fully complete at least nine of the eleven chapter assignments. Additionally, she assigns eight Connect homework assignments.

These Connect assignments are due after students go over the material in class (typically a week later, but sometimes just the next class period). With the flexibility built into Connect and SmartBook , she is able to assign a mix of algorithmic problems, multiple choice, and static problems.

Students are allowed to check their work once per question; they are also allowed two attempts on their work. Their highest score on the assignment is the one that's recorded. They can rework the assignment after the due date as a study attempt, too, although, she says, most don't use this feature. "The few who do, really appreciate it."

At times Lee uses web activity assignments in Connect to assign videos for students to watch, or articles to read, which are then discussed in class. These aren't assigned for points, however. The web activity assignment feature allows Lee to link an article or video through Connect and have it show up in Blackboard, just as any other assignment would.

The single sign-on feature is critical to the success of using Connect, she says. This feature provides a seamless experience for students to simply click a link in Blackboard and go right to their Connect homework or SmartBook chapter. "Grades flow straight into my gradebook in Blackboard. This seamless integration is the only way to go."

Lee typically sets SmartBook assignments at between 15 and 25 questions (depending on how much of the chapter is covered in the assignment). For a Connect assignment, she adds, she typically assigns between three questions (if they're all multi-part algorithmic questions) and ten questions (consisting of a mix of multiple choice and problems). "That can really vary. If there's a good interactive activity in a chapter, my Connect assignment might have fifteen questions."

With the use of Connect and SmartBook , students are coming to class prepared to discuss that week's chapter. If Lee hasn't assigned SmartBook , however, she says, "then I have to dial it back to a 'this is the definition of the term' level. I can skip that when SmartBook has been assigned."

Based on student understanding for each course, Lee modifies the homework assignments in Connect each semester, tweaking them to add questions where she thinks students need more practice. She can also eliminate a question that didn't help student understanding. Lee tailors her lectures to teach accordingly, and students see a consistent approach to solving the problems, which ultimately cuts down on confusion.

Using Connect and SmartBook also has changed Lee's classroom preparation, she finds, since students bring an understanding of the material into the classroom. She can then focus on finding examples of real-life situations to deepen their knowledge. For example, in an assigned chapter, rather than defining the terms, mission, strategy, goal, and explaining what a strategic business unit is, "I let SmartBook take care of that. I get to talk about what's going on with self-driving cars and how Fiat's partnership with BMW and Intel will enable them to compete in production of cars as product designs change."

Since her first use of Connect eight years ago, Lee has experimented and learned what works and what doesn't. For instance, she found that if she created homework assignments that were listed as optional, "then maybe 1 percent of students did them." She also learned, she recalled, that without single sign-on, students are far less likely to get the work done.

In Spring 2017, Lee asked students to share feedback about their experience with SmartBook . A few responses illustrate just how favorable their experiences were:

• 'SmartBook has really helped me this semester because it gives me a chance to familiarize myself with concepts before the class discussion.'
• 'Overall, SmartBook was a fantastic learning device and helped me a lot with the class, as well as motivated me to stay on top of my homework.'
• 'I think the SmartBook is like any text that is read. It gives you a baseline idea, then later in class the subject is more defined and the idea sticks.'
• 'I generally click practice first and more or less work backwards from there. I found it very useful. Helped speed up a process that is generally slow and boring.'
• 'I generally follow the procedure (read, then practice) at first, but if I'm crunched for time, I just use my text and look for the answers for the practice. I think that it is useful because I actually take time to stop and actually read.'
• 'I personally have liked using SmartBook as we are asked questions after we read, which helps on understanding what you know and don't.'

Ultimately, she says, her initial goals of reducing the turn around time and time spent on manually grading homework required to grade homework and giving students real time feedback have been fully met.

Going forward, Lee adds, she always checks out changes in Connect, such as the latest feature in which an entire section of the book is displayed on a single SmartBook page, "so it's easier to see all the highlighting for a single section in one place."

"I plan to continue using Connect in my Introduction to Operations Management sections at Boise State. I've pretty much got a workable formula in place." Lee says that not only are students gaining the immediate feedback she had aimed for, it has addressed another issue: "It's much less common for my students to share their answers from Connect," Lee found.

Plus, negative student evaluation comments about being required to read a textbook have gone away. With SmartBook , she says, "I never see those comments anymore."

Since launching the system first in 2008, she says, "I've been really excited to see how many improvements have been made in Connect over the years, and how far SmartBook has come."

Tracie Lee is a lecturer at Boise State University, teaching supply chain and business statistics courses. Before joining Boise State's College of Business and Economics, she taught business courses at the University of Idaho from 2007 to 2015. Tracie also serves as a Digital Faculty Consultant and Subject Matter Expert for McGraw-Hill Education in Operations Management, Business Statistics, and Project Management. Prior workplace adventures include ten years in Hewlett-Packard Company's supply chain organization; a year with the IT division of an aerospace company; and three years in Operations with a telecom. At various times, she has earned an undergraduate in Russian Studies from Amherst College, an MBA from Arizona State, and a Master of International Management from Thunderbird.

Students are more likely to be familiar with concepts by the time they come to class....I start my lecture preparation for most chapters assuming they already have familiarity with basic concepts because of the SmartBook assignment.

Digital Product in Use: Connect® Operations Management Course Name: Principles of Macroeconomics LMS: Blackboard Course Type: Introduction to Operations Management Credit Hours: Three Program in Use: Operations Management 13e, by William Stevenson Instructor Name: Tracie Lee Enrollment: 2 sections; 40 students/section, 550-600 students/year (college total)

Instructor's implementation goals:

• Provide immediate homework feedback to students
• Reduce labor of grading papers
• Eliminate the tendency for students to share their homework answers with their peers

Benefits to instructor after using Connect :

• Students are coming to class with an understanding of the material.
• Students are gaining the immediate feedback they need to practice and improve their work.
• Lee is spending less time grading and teaching rote concepts while spending more time discussing current events.

Course Description:

This course is a survey of the fundamental concepts and basic tools related to operations and supply chain management. In addition to discussing the strategic role of operations management in an organization, the course covers specific techniques for managing the operations function. Students who complete this course are able to explain how operations management can provide a company with a competitive advantage, and are able to apply selected techniques to the management of a firm's operations function.

Institution Profile:

Boise State University (BSU) is a four-year public college in Boise, Idaho. The college was founded by the Episcopal church in 1932 and became an independent junior college in 1934. By 1965 the college was providing bachelors and master's degrees. BSU has nearly 24,000 students, about 75 percent of whom are Idaho residents. It also has the largest graduate enrollment in the state of Idaho. The college offers more than 190 fields of study including arts and sciences, business and economics, education, engineering, health sciences, public service, and innovation and design.

Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021

Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies

Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.

Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.

Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.

Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four.  Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls,  Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.

Other year-end data for 2021 showed:

• Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
• Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
• The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
• Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
• A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
• Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
• The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.

CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.

All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .

And the Top 40 cases studies of 2021 are:

1.   Hertz Global Holdings (A): Uses of Debt and Equity

2.   Coffee 2016

3.   Hertz Global Holdings (B): Uses of Debt and Equity 2020

4.   Glory, Glory Man United!

5.   Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive

6.   The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?

7.   Strategy for Norway's Pension Fund Global

8.   Prodigy Finance

9.   Design at Mayo

10. Cadbury

11. City Hospital Emergency Room

13. Volkswagen

14. Marina Bay Sands

15. Shake Shack IPO

16. Mastercard

17. Netflix

18. Ant Financial

19. AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics

20. IBM Corporate Service Corps

21. Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms

22. Alternative Meat Industry

23. Children's Premier

24. Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)

25. Palm Oil 2016

26. Teach For All: Designing a Global Network

27. What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit

28. Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options

30. Project Sammaan

31. Commonfund ESG

32. Polaroid

33. Connecticut Green Bank 2018: After the Raid

34. FieldFresh Foods

35. The Alibaba Group

36. 360 State Street: Real Options

37. Herman Miller

38. AgBiome

39. Nathan Cummings Foundation

40. Toyota 2010

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Exploring generative ai at harvard.

Jessica McCann

Harvard Correspondent

Leaders weigh in on where we are and what’s next

The explosion of generative AI technology over the past year and a half is raising big questions about how these tools will impact higher education. Across Harvard, members of the community have been exploring how GenAI will change the ways we teach, learn, research, and work.

As part of this effort, the Office of the Provost has convened three working groups . They will discuss questions, share innovations, and evolve guidance and community resources. They are:

• The Teaching and Learning Group , chaired by Bharat Anand , vice provost for advances in learning and the Henry R. Byers Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. This group seeks to share resources, identify emerging best practices, guide policies, and support the development of tools to address common challenges among faculty and students.
• The Research and Scholarship Group , chaired by John Shaw , vice provost for research, Harry C. Dudley Professor of Structural and Economic Geology in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, and professor of environmental science and engineering in the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science. It focuses on how to enable, and support the integrity of, scholarly activities with generative AI tools.
• T he Administration and Operations Group , chaired by Klara Jelinkova , vice president and University chief information officer. It is charged with addressing information security, data privacy, procurement, and administration and organizational efficiencies.

Klara Jelinkova, Bharat Anand, and John Shaw.

Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer; Evgenia Eliseeva; and courtesy of John Shaw

The Gazette spoke with Anand, Shaw, and Jelinkova to understand more about the work of these groups and what’s next in generative AI at Harvard.

When generative AI tools first emerged, we saw universities respond in a variety of ways — from encouraging experimentation to prohibiting their use. What was Harvard’s overall approach?

Shaw: From the outset, Harvard has embraced the prospective benefits that GenAI offers to teaching, research, and administration across the University, while being mindful of the potential pitfalls. As a University, our mission is to help enable discovery and innovation, so we had a mandate to actively engage. We set some initial, broad policies that helped guide us, and have worked directly with groups across the institution to provide tools and resources to inspire exploration.

Jelinkova: The rapid emergence of these tools meant the University needed to react quickly, to provide both tools for innovation and experimentation and guidelines to ensure their responsible use. We rapidly built an AI Sandbox to enable faculty, students, and staff to experiment with multiple large language models in a secure environment. We also worked with external vendors to acquire enterprise licenses for a variety of tools to meet many different use cases. Through working groups, we were able to learn, aggregate and collate use cases for AI in teaching, learning, administration, and research. This coordinated, collective, and strategic approach has put Harvard ahead of many peers in higher education.

Anand: Teaching and learning are fundamentally decentralized activities. So our approach was to ask: First, how can we ensure that local experimentation by faculty and staff is enabled as much as possible; and second, how can we ensure that it’s consistent with University policies on IP, copyright, and security? We also wanted to ensure that novel emerging practices were shared across Schools, rather than remaining siloed.

What do these tools mean for faculty, in terms of the challenges they pose or the opportunities they offer? Is there anything you’re particularly excited about?

Anand: Let’s start with some salient challenges. How do we first sift through the hype that’s accompanied GenAI? How can we make it easy for faculty to use GenAI tools in their classrooms without overburdening them with yet another technology? How can one address real concerns about GenAI’s impact?

While we’re still early in this journey, many compelling opportunities — and more importantly, some systematic ways of thinking about them — are emerging. Various Harvard faculty have leaned into experimenting with LLMs in their classrooms. Our team has now interviewed over 30 colleagues across Harvard and curated short videos that capture their learnings. I encourage everyone to view these materials on the new GenAI site; they are remarkable in their depth and breadth of insight.

Here’s a sample: While LLMs are commonly used for Q&A, our faculty have creatively used them for a broader variety of tasks, such as simulating tutors that guide learning by asking questions, simulating instructional designers to provide active learning tips, and simulating student voices to predict how a class discussion might flow, thus aiding in lesson preparation. Others demonstrate how more sophisticated prompts or “prompt engineering” are often necessary to yield more sophisticated LLM responses, and how LLMs can extend well beyond text-based responses to visuals, simulations, coding, and games. And several faculty show how LLMs can help overcome subtle yet important learning frictions like skill gaps in coding, language literacy, or math.

Do these tools offer students an opportunity to support or expand upon their learning?

Anand: Yes. GenAI represents a unique area of innovation where students and faculty are working together. Many colleagues are incorporating student feedback into the GenAI portions of their curriculum or making their own GenAI tools available to students. Since GenAI is new, the pedagogical path is not yet well defined; students have an opportunity to make their voices heard, as co-creators, on what they think the future of their learning should look like.

Beyond this, we’re starting to see other learning benefits. Importantly, GenAI can reach beyond a lecture hall. Thoughtful prompt engineering can turn even publicly available GenAI tools into tutorbots that generate interactive practice problems, act as expert conversational aids for material review, or increase TA teams’ capacity. That means both that the classroom is expanding and that more of it is in students’ hands. There’s also evidence that these bots field more questions than teaching teams can normally address and can be more comfortable and accessible for some students.

Of course, we need to identify and counter harmful patterns. There is a risk, in this early and enthusiastic period, of sparking over-reliance on GenAI. Students must critically evaluate how and where they use it, given its possibility of inaccurate or inappropriate responses, and should heed the areas where their style of cognition outperforms AI. One other thing to watch out for is user divide: Some students will graduate with vastly better prompt engineering skills than others, an inequality that will only magnify in the workforce.

What are the main questions your group has been tackling?

Anand: Our group divided its work into three subgroups focused on policy, tools, and resources. We’ve helped guide initial policies to ensure safe and responsible use; begun curating resources for faculty in a One Harvard repository ; and are exploring which tools the University should invest in or develop to ensure that educators and researchers can continue to advance their work.

In the fall, we focused on supporting and guiding HUIT’s development of the AI Sandbox. The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching’s annual conference , which focused exclusively on GenAI, had its highest participation in 10 years. Recently, we’ve been working with the research group to inform the development of tools that promise broad, generalizable use for faculty (e.g., tutorbots).

What has your group focused on in discussions so far about generative AI tools’ use in research?

Shaw: Our group has some incredible strength in researchers who are at the cutting edge of GenAI development and applications, but also includes voices that help us understand the real barriers to faculty and students starting to use these tools in their own research and scholarship. Working with the other teams, we have focused on supporting development and use of the GenAI sandbox, examining IP and security issues, and learning from different groups across campus how they are using these tools to innovate.

Are there key areas of focus for your group in the coming months?

Shaw: We are focused on establishing programs — such as the new GenAI Milton Fund track — to help support innovation in the application of these tools across the wide range of scholarship on our campus. We are also working with the College to develop new programs to help support students who wish to engage with faculty on GenAI-enabled projects. We aim to find ways to convene students and scholars to share their experiences and build a stronger community of practitioners across campus.

What types of administration and operations questions are your group is exploring, and what type of opportunities do you see in this space?

Jelinkova: By using the group to share learnings from across Schools and units, we can better provide technologies to meet the community’s needs while ensuring the most responsible and sustainable use of the University’s financial resources. The connections within this group also inform the guidelines that we provide; by learning how generative AI is being used in different contexts, we can develop best practices and stay alert to emerging risks. There are new tools becoming available almost every day, and many exciting experiments and pilots happening across Harvard, so it’s important to regularly review and update the guidance we provide to our community.

Can you talk a bit about what has come out of these discussions, or other exciting things to come?

Jelinkova: Because this technology is rapidly evolving, we are continually tracking the release of new tools and working with our vendors as well as open-source efforts to ensure we are best supporting the University’s needs. We’re developing more guidance and hosting information sessions on helping people to understand the AI landscape and how to choose the right tool for their task. Beyond tools, we’re also working to build connections across Harvard to support collaboration, including a recently launched AI community of practice . We are capturing valuable findings from emerging technology pilot programs in HUIT , the EVP area , and across Schools. And we are now thinking about how those findings can inform guiding principles and best practices to better support staff.

While the GenAI groups are investigating these questions, Harvard faculty and scholars are also on the forefront of research in this space. Can you talk a bit about some of the interesting research happening across the University in AI more broadly ?

Shaw: Harvard has made deep investments in the development and application of AI across our campus, in our Schools, initiatives, and institutes — such as the Kempner Institute and Harvard Data Science Initiative. In addition, there is a critical role for us to play in examining and guiding the ethics of AI applications — and our strengths in the Safra and Berkman Klein centers, as examples, can be leading voices in this area.

What would be your advice for members of our community who are interested in learning more about generative AI tools?

Anand: I’d encourage our community to view the resources available on the new Generative AI @ Harvard website , to better understand how GenAI tools might benefit you.

There’s also no substitute for experimentation with these tools to learn what works, what does not, and how to tailor them for maximal benefit for your particular needs. And of course, please know and respect University policies around copyright and security.

We’re in the early stages of this journey at Harvard, but it’s exciting.

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