Questions and Answers of Managerial Decision Modeling Business Analytics With Spreadsheet

34 Pendelton County plans to develop several new recreational facilities that must be completed within the $3.5 million budget. A survey of county residents has resulted in information about the
35 Theo Harris earns $55,000 a year and has $9,000 to invest in a portfolio. His investment alternatives and their expected returns are shown in the table at the top of the next column.INVESTMENT
36 A hospital kitchen needs to make a fruit salad that contains at least 6,500 units of vitamin A and 1,800 units of vitamin C. Data on five available fruits are shown in the following table.FRUIT
37 Consider the following NLP problem:Maximize 10X1 + 15X2 + 25X3 subject to the constraints X1 + X2 + X3 … 12 X1 2 + X2 2 … 32 2X1 + X3 3 … 44 X1, X2, X3 Ú 0(a) Set up and solve the model by
38 Consider the following NLP problem:Maximize 2X1 + X2 - 2X3 + 3X1X2 + 7X3 3 subject to the constraints 2X1 + 4X2 + 3X3 Ú 34 3X1+ X2 Ú 10 X1 + X2 + X3 … 12 X1, X2, X3 Ú 0(a) Set up and solve
40 A snowmobile manufacturer produces three models, the XJ6, the XJ7, and the XJ8. In any given productionplanning week, the company has 40 hours available in its final testing bay. Each XJ6 requires
41 Susan Jones would like her investment portfolio to be selected from a combination of three stocks—Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Let variables A , B , and G denote the percentages of the portfolio
42 Ashworth Industries would like to make a price and production decision on two of its products. Define QA and QB as the quantities of products A and B to produce and PA and PB as the price for
43 The Kimten Manufacturing Company needs to process 18 jobs. Kimten can process each job on any of the six machines it has available, but each job must be allocated to only one machine. Iqbal Ahmed,
1. Understand how to plan, monitor, and control projects using PERT/CPM.
2. Determine earliest start, earliest finish, latest start, latest finish, and slack times for each activity.
3. Understand the impact of variability in activity times on the project completion time.
4. Develop resource loading charts to plan, monitor, and control the use of various resources during a project.
5. Use LP to find the least-cost solution to reduce total project time and solve these LP models using Excel’s Solver.
6. Understand the important role of software such as Microsoft Project in project management.
2 What are the major differences between PERT and CPM?
3 What is an activity? What is an immediate pred ecessor?
4 Describe how expected activity times and variances can be computed in a PERT analysis.
6 What are the EST and LST? How are they computed?
9 Briefly describe how project budgets can be monitored.
10 What is crashing, and how is it done by hand?
11 Why is LP useful in project crashing?Problems
12 A certification program consists of a series of activities that must be accomplished in a certain order.The activities, their immediate predecessors, and estimated durations appear in the
13 A local political campaign must coordinate a number of necessary activities to be prepared for an upcoming election. The following table describes the relationships between these activities that
14 The Pickett Marketing Firm is developing a new Web-based media campaign for a client. The following table describes the relationships between the activities that need to be completed.ACTIVITY
15 The activities required to design a prototype of an experimental machine are listed in the following table, along with their immediate predecessors and estimated durations.ACTIVITY IMMEDIATE
16 An office complex is to be renovated. Before the job can be completed, various tradespeople and skilled workers must install their materials. The table at the top of the next page describes the
17 An electrical contractor is examining the amount of time his crews take to complete wiring jobs. Some crews seem to take longer than others. For an upcoming job, a list of activities and their
18 A plant engineering group needs to set up an assembly line to produce a new product. The table in the next column describes the relationships between the activities that need to be completed for
19 A plant is acquiring new production machinery. Before the machinery can be fully functional, a number of activities must be performed, including roughing out for power, placing the machinery,
20 A series of activities must be completed in a coordinated fashion to complete a landscaping overhaul.The following table shows the activities; their optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic
21 LeBron Woods is responsible for developing a leadership training program for his organization. The following table describes the relationships between the activities that need to be
22 The expected project completion time for the construction of a pleasure yacht is 21 months, and the project variance is 6. What is the probability that the project will(a) require at least 17
24 The General Foundry air pollution project discussed in this chapter has progressed over the past several weeks, and it is now the end of week 8. Lester Harky would like to know the value of the
25 Fred Ridgeway has been given the responsibility of managing a training and development program.He knows the EST and LST (both in months), and the total costs for each activity. This information is
26 Fred Ridgeway’s project (see Problem 25) has progressed over the past several months, and it is now the end of month 16. Fred would like to know the current status of the project with regard to
27 Susan Roger needs to coordinate the opening of a new office for her company in the city of Denver.The activity time and relationships for this project, as well as the total budgeted cost for each
28 Susan Roger’s project (see Problem 27) has progressed over the past several weeks, and it is now the end of week 8. Susan would like to know the current status of the project with regard to
29 General Foundry’s project crashing data are shown in Table 10 . Crash this project by hand to 10 weeks. What are the final times for each activity after crashing, and what is the total cost
30 Bowman Builders manufactures steel storage sheds for commercial use. Joe Bowman, president of Bowman Builders, is contemplating producing sheds for home use. The activities necessary to build an
33 Software Development Specialists (SDS) is involved with developing software for customers in the banking industry. SDS breaks a large programming project into teams that perform the necessary
35 Getting a degree from a college or university can be a long and difficult task. Certain courses must be completed before other courses may be taken. Develop a network diagram in which every
36 Dream Team Productions is in the final design phases of its new film, Killer Worms , to be released next summer. Market Wise, the firm hired to coordinate the release of Killer Worms toys, has
1. Define decision model and describe the importance of such models.
2. Understand the two types of decision models:deterministic and probabilistic models.
3. Understand the steps involved in developing decision models in practical situations.
4. Understand the use of spreadsheets in developing decision models.
5. Discuss possible problems in developing decision models.
9 List some sources of input data.
10 Define decision variable . Give some examples of variables in a decision model.
11 What is a problem parameter? Give some examples of parameters in a decision model.
12 List some advantages of using spreadsheets for decision modeling.
13 What is implementation, and why is it important?
14 Describe the use of sensitivity analysis, or postoptimality analysis, in analyzing the results of decision models.
22 St. Joseph’s School has 1,200 students, each of whom currently pays $8,000 per year to attend. In addition to revenues from tuition, the school receives an appropriation from the church to
23 Refer to Problem 22. Sensing resistance to the idea of raising tuition from members of St. Joseph’s Church, one of the board members suggested that the 960 children of church members could
24 Refer to Problems 22 and 23. Another board member believes that if church members pay $8,000 in tuition, the most St. Joseph’s can increase nonmember tuition is $1,000 per year. She suggests
Consider Figure 4.11, which shows the sensitivity report for the Flair Furniture example in Section 4.3. For each of the situations described below, check to see if the 100% rule can be used to
Modify the Executive Furniture example of Section 5.3 to include another potential factory in Little Rock, Arkansas. Unit costs from Little Rock are $4 to Albuquerque, $6 to Boston, and $4 to
Complete the exercise that asks you to compute the average fill rate for Simkin’s Hardware Store as described under “Analyzing the Results” for the Data Table for Figure 10.10.Figure 10.10
An alternative to using Excel’s built-in functions to generate “live” random numbers that change each time that a model is recalculated is to use Excel’s Random Number Generator tool found
In the old game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” contestants chose one of three curtains, behind which were either fabulous prizes or nothing, or worse (sometimes “booby prizes” would be behind a
What is a correlation coefficient? Why is it useful?
Explain how Solver can be used to identify the optimal weights in the weighted moving averages model.
Suppose that you are using exponential smoothing method described in this chapter to forecast sales, and you know that sales will be decreasing every period for the foreseeable future. What value of
In Figure 11.35, we discovered a potential multicollinearity problem. It appeared that home size was no longer a significant input given the presence of land area.(a) Run a single regression based on
A limitation of using ExcelModules for some of the forecasting models described in this chapter is that the program creates a custom spreadsheet that covers a specific length of time. Thus, as actual
Jacquie Welkener owns a company that manufactures sailboats. Actual demand for Jacquie’s sailboats during each of the past two years was as follows:Jacquie has forecasted that annual demand for her
Suppose that you use a weighted moving average forecasting method with weights of 12, 30, and 20, for one period ago, two periods ago, and three periods ago, respectively. If January’s demand was
What is a random variable? What are the various types of random variables?
Which of the following are probability distributions? Why?(a)Random Variable X ................ Probability−2 .................................................... 0.1−1
Complete the exercise that asks you to compute other output measures for Simkin’s Hardware Store and include them in the Scenario Manager as described under “Analyzing the Results” for the
The newsvendor model is a classic inventory problem based on the situation of newsstand owner who must determine how many newspapers to order early in the morning to satisfy that day’s demand. She
Consider Figure 10.10 for Simkin’s Hardware Store. Column J in the spreadsheet indicates a value of 1 if an order is placed and a value of 0 if an order is not placed. Modify the spreadsheet to
If you look carefully at the formulas in this chapter for all four unlimited population models, you can verify that for each one, L = λW and Lq = λWq. These are instances of the more general
Consider a standard M/M/1 queuing system at a bank with a single teller. You know that customers arrive at a rate of 40 per hour (Poisson distributed). If you also know that the teller is idle on
Richard Muszynski’s Gas and Wash has an automatic car wash, and customers purchasing gas at the station receive a discounted car wash, depending on the number of gallons of gas they buy. The car
Lizao Zhang, owner of Lizao Zhang’s Treats, is considering the purchase of three alternative self-serve sundae machines to serve customers. The average service time for all three machines is
A unique feature of the exponential distribution is that the standard deviation of its service time is equal to the mean of its service time.(a) Run the M/M/1 model with an arrival rate of 20
A unique feature of the exponential distribution is that the standard deviation of its service time is equal to the mean of its service time.(a) Run the M/M/1 model with an arrival rate of 15
Consider the Arnold’s Muffler Shop example in Figure 9.8. Arnold has three chairs in the waiting room area.(a) If all customers who bring their cars into the shop want to wait in the waiting room,
A typical subway station in Washington, DC, has six turnstiles, each of which can be controlled by the station manager to be used for either entrance or exit control—but never for both. The manager
Bru-Thru is a chain of drive-through beer and wine outlets where customers arrive, on average, every five minutes. Management has a goal that customers will be able to complete their transaction, on
What are the components of the following systems? Draw and explain the configuration of each.(a) Barbershop(b) Car wash(c) Laundromat(d) Small grocery store
The “equally likely” decision criterion is equivalent to a “maxi-mean” rule. A related, but not necessarily equivalent rule would be “maxi-median”. Apply a “maxi-median” rule to the
Revise the Excel spreadsheet in Figure 8.3 to create a template for a decision with four alternatives and four outcomes.Figure 8.3 A. D. E 1 Thompson Lumber (Dec Making Under Risk) 3 PAYOFFS Outcomes
Consider the Thompson Lumber EMV decision from Table 8.8. Suppose that the utility function for Thompson Lumber can be expressed as 1 – 1.2 – [(X + 120,000) / 30,000] for monetary value
Revise the Excel spreadsheet in Figure 8.1 to create a template for a decision with four alternatives and four outcomes.Figure 8.1 IF function is used to identify the best alternative. Identifies
Xun Xu’s Aeronautics is comparing market research proposals from two different companies. If both research reports were free, the EMV using the report from Jackson Analytics would be $240,000,
Create your own new decision criterion for decision making under uncertainty that is logical but not exactly the same as the five criteria described in Section 8.4.(a) Describe the rule in complete
The decision tree in Figure 8.18 is designed to choose the cost-minimizing strategy set. What is the expected monetary value of the best solution? $30 0.75 $120 2 0.25 0.30 0.65 $58 $99 0.50 0.35
What is the purpose of utility theory?
What is an alternative? What is an outcome?
Consider the budgeting problem for the General Foundry project as described in Section 7.5, using the information provided in Table 7.4. Suppose that cash flow is a big concern for the project
Consider the data for a simple project as given in the following table.(a) Note that this project has only one path. What is the expected completion time of the project?(b) What is the probability of
Consider the data for a simple project as given in the following table.(a) What is the critical path? What is the expected completion time of the project?(b) What is the probability of all activities
Suppose that you are chair of the senior banquet planning committee at your college. Develop a list of activities for this project, including considerations such as entertainment, guest speaker,
Complete the designated calculations for the following subsets of activities. Each subset is independent of the other subsets in the problem.(a) Activity H has an EFT of 12 days. Activity I has an
The table for this problem describes the various activities of a construction project in a chemical plant.(a) Set up and solve an LP model using Excel to crash this project to 22 days. What is the
What is an activity? What is an immediate predecessor?

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