Whew, I’m glad the town hall meeting is over. The audience was hostile!” Tom Bourbon commented as he was escorted by a police officer to his car in the high school parking lot. The officer replied. “There were over 1,000 people in the gymnasium, sir, and they were in an uproar. Let’s get you out of here safely.”
Tom and the other City Council members had just finished a town hall meeting open to the public to discuss four alternative locations for a new $80 million baseball stadium in Lee County, Florida. The City Council originally evaluated 16 sites and had arrived at the final four locations. The new 10,000-seat ballpark also includes practice fields, batting cages, and weight rooms. The stadium facility design and layout is to mimic the regular season Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. However, the new park planned on “going green” by reducing energy consumption, allocating a carpooling parking lot close to the stadium to reduce patron traffic congestion and transportation costs and fuel use, and changing some of its work practices.
The five board members of City Council have to make a location decision in three weeks if they are to meet the contractual requirements of previous agreements.
Once the stadium for spring training was complete, the Red Sox would sign a 30-year lease. Two economic impact studies indicated the stadium would generate $25 to $40 million annually to the local economy and support thousands of jobs in airports, hotels, restaurants, and retail stores.

Case Questions for Discussion:

You just finished your college’s spring semester and have been working for the City Council as a summer intern. Your major is Information Systems & Operations Management (ISOM), and you want to earn a good recommendation from your summer intern boss. Your boss asks you to build an electronic spreadsheet model that scores, weights, and evaluates each quantitative and qualitative criterion and arrives at a summary score for each stadium site. To organize your analysis, you decide to answer the following questions:

1. Using the center-of-gravity model and Exhibit 6.12, compute the center of gravity for the population of the county. Show all computations, explain, and justify. Based solely on this criterion, where is the best stadium location?

2. Using a weighted scoring model of your own design, what are the summary scores for each stadium site for the qualitative criteria in Exhibit 6.13? (You must decide how to scale and weight each criterion and whether to include or not include cost estimates.) Show all calculations and explain your approach. You might wish to use Excel to perform these calculations. The data in Exhibit 6.12 are available in the Excel worksheet Red Sox Case Data on MindTap.

3. How will you combine these results (your center-of-gravity results, cost, and qualitative criteria analyses)? How might you compute a summary score for each site using all three criteria? Explain and justify.

4. Research and explain at least three ways a sports stadium can “go green,” including at least one work practice for stadium employees. Do jobs and processes have to change too? Explain the role of OM.

5. What is your final stadium recommendation? Explain and justify.

Transcribed Image Text:

EXHIBIT 6.12 Location Grid for Boston Red Sox Spring Training Stadium Finalists 12 miles 11 H 10 9 8 7 2 1 0 Population Center 1 1 Population Center 4 2 North 3 1-75 Population Center 3 4 5 6 7 SOA Shopping Mall 1 Shopping Mall 2 D Site B 8 Sita D Airport SKOC 9 FGCU Population Center 2 Population Cantar 5 10 11 12 milles