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Managing the Rush!!! A Case of a Transport Department in a Management Institute*

CASE STUDY, OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
ET Cases - GSMC, 9 Pages
AUTHOR(S) : Peeyush Pandey, Doctoral student - IIM Indore and Tuhin Sengupta, Doctoral Student - IIM Indore

Case Preview

Managing the Rush!!! A Case of a Transport Department in a Management Institute

 

It was 9:00 a.m. in the morning, Prof. Abhishek Nayak (Nayak), Head of Department (Operations Management), Indore Management Institute (IMI), arrived in his office. As always, he was flooded with official papers waiting to be reviewed by him. The moment he was about to start his work, administrative peon handed him over a letter from Dean (Administration). Prof. Nayak left all his work and started to read Dean’s letter (Exhibit I), as he was not expecting any communication from him and thought there  must be an urgent issue to ponder upon............

About Indore Management Institute

The Indore Management Institute established in 1995, is one of the prestigious private business schools in India, located in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. The 157 acres campus of IMI is located at 15 km from Indore city. The institute offers various programmes in management discipline:...........

Transport Department at IMI

Transport department, one of the key departments at IMI employed a large share of its total employees. It was responsible for providing commutation facilities to the students for coming and going out of the campus. The department had a good mix of buses and vehicles for different purposes:............

The Challenge: Manage the Rush

After reading the letter and reviewing the data attached (Exhibit III, Exhibit IV (A), Exhibit IV (B) and Exhibit IV (C)), Prof. Nayak was wondering how a management institute is not able to manage its most vital operation. After spending some time on the problem, he decided to first forecast the demand of the immediate week, i.e., 1st week of April 2015 based on data of past three months. Forecasting demand over a longer period may have led to inaccurate forecasts due to seasonal trends such as examinations, festivals, admissions, fests, etc...........

Exhibits

Exhibit I: Letter from Dean (Administration)

Exhibit II: Programme-wise Break-up of Students

Exhibit III: Shuttle Bus Schedule

Exhibit IV (A): Demand of Students for January 2015

Exhibit IV (B): Demand of Students for February 2015

Exhibit IV (C): Demand of Students for the Month of March 2015

Exhibit V: Actual Demand Data for the First Week of April 2015

Teaching Note Preview

Managing the Rush!!! A Case of a Transport Department in a Management Institute

 

Synopsis

Due to surge in demand for management institutions, the prominent location and the space for building institution is a myth. Institutes these days are located little bit far off from the main city or town due to higher cost of real estate. This case presents the scenario of one of those institutes - Indore Management Institute (IMI) located 15 km from the Indore city. Students at IMI mainly rely on the shuttle buses for going to city and coming back. The transport services at IMI caught the attention of higher authorities when the underutilized buses consumed a larger portion of total transportation cost. As requested by Dean (Administration), Prof. Nayak undertook the problem to find an optimal schedule of available vehicles at IMI by applying appropriate forecasting techniques to arrive at the optimal solution.

Case Positioning and Setting

This case can be used for either of the following programs/courses/Modules:

  • • MBA Program – Applied Quantitative Techniques Course
  • • MBA Progrm – Operations Management Course

 

Assignment questions

  • I. What are the relevant forecasting techniques which can be applied to this problem?
  • II. What is the difference between Moving Average and Exponential Smoothing and which among the two is better for this context?
  • III. Formulate a MIP to obtain the optimal mix of vehicles for the problem being studied.

 

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Abstract

India has witnessed a surge of management institutes in recent times. However, due to the obvious need for space, the locations of these institutions have been far off from the main city or town. This has increased the dependency of students on the institute vehicles commuting to and from the city. Managing these transportation facilities also poses a lot of challenges for the institute. Indore Management Institute, a premier management college of India realized that the operational cost incurred by its transport department could have been reduced if proper demand of students could have been forecasted. This case presents a challenging problem which requires use of operation management techniques to arrive at an optimal solution.



Pedagogical Objectives

  • To understand how to apply simple forecasting techniques in a real life business scenario without using any computational intensive methodology like time series econometrics
  • To learn how to simultaneously use two different quantitative techniques such as Mixed Integer programming in cohesion with forecasting methods to solve a problem

Case Positioning and Setting

This case can be used for either of the following programs/courses/Modules:

  • MBA Program – Applied Quantitative Techniques Course
  • MBA Program – Operations Management Course


* GSMC 2016, IIM Raipur

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- Abstract
- Case Study
- Teaching Note (**ONLY for Academicians)


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