Excel Spreadsheets

Asked this morning to set up the decision screens in the factories to produce Excel spreadsheet versions of the historical data to help the students "reflect" on how the exercise has gone. (I think "reflect" might be a euphemism for identifying the guilty...). Compared to some of the weird requests I am asked to make, this was a piece of cake. Just used ExcelLibrary (http://code.google.com/p/excellibrary/) to dump database tables into Excel spreadsheet files on the server then put links into the ASP.NET website. The files are enormous, so that should keep the students occupied for an hour or two.

Prima Colazione del Cane

Spotted today that one of the MBA students had cut a price yesterday for one item to one customer to £3000, when I presume they meant to cut it to £30000. As this is below the scrap value, result was massive surge in orders from this one customer for this one assembly. Pointed this out and was told this rapid descent into mayhem would be "educational" for the students. I then pointed out that having large numbers of orders placed on this item everyday feeding through to the requirement for forgings would generate inventory at a rate that would crash the simulation in eight hours, at which point the educational attractiveness of chaos went out of the window. The boss dived in and reset the value and I had to write a mod fast to wipe out the orders generated by the assumed mistake. I am not sure how pedagocically sound this action is.

The planning system has still thrown a surge of inventory on one family of parts into this factory, so maybe one of the students might spot this and realise increasing the capacity, if only short-term, might stop it all gumming up.

Second Life MBA Class

I have been drafted in to sort out some odd little technical quirks with the simulation in Second Life. It is now being used by the current MBA class. Nice to see that the edicts that students should not appear as non-humans are being ignored. We seem to have a rich collection of furries... plus a robot, who I think is Japanese, so no cultural stereotypes here!

The simulation is set up with high inventory and low resource utilisations, just to make sure it does not spiral out of control while students are getting acquainted with it. But this means it takes time for sales managers to realise that cutting prices a bit will start to increase sales and thus get the factories running more efficiently.

Opensim

Following the price hike from Linden I have been asked to look at moving our virtual worlds presence from Second Life to OpenSim. It will be cheaper and demonstrate our touching faith in open software. On the suggestion that we close down the SL region immediately and shift everything across for the start of the coming semester our faith in open source in general and OpenSim in particular was found to be less rock-solid, so the plan is to run them in parallel in the coming year. Aim is to run OpenSim on a virtual server with 4GB RAM and Windows 2008 R2, but not sure exactly how much virtual real estate this will give us, and get it set up by the start of semester in mid-September. What could possibly go wrong?

Tweetject

A colleague pointed me to an article by Julian Bleecker (http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf) discussing blogjects, inanimate devices that blog and I thought that this could be useful in virtual simulation exercises. The simulation is running 24/7, so it would be useful to have avatars in the simulation communicate to participants not currently inworld about what is happening. So as a trial I have set up the factory simulation to generate tweets on my ShaleBing account whenever the factory fails to meet customer orders. Getting the simulation to generate tweets is very easy, but getting it to generate messages with enough variety to make it almost seem a real person is sending them is a bit trickier. We will see whether this is useful when it is used in class next semester.

Shrinking World

Heard on the Radio 4 PM programme yesterday afternoon that Linden Labs, the operators of Second Life, are laying off 30% of their staff. More details . The coverage was very negative, arguing the virtual world bubble had burst and it was all going to go a bit Friends Reunited. A lot of it does indeed look pretty pointless. However, the difference is that there are uses of Second Life that have some commercial logic and don't just depend on the buzz. In maintaining an island in Second Life for management simulations we are effectively doing two things: paying to have a server maintained and being able to make the simulations very accessible to casual visitors. If Linden Labs slipped over the side of their flat virtual World tomorrow the simulation could be shifted onto an Opensim server that we would have to maintain in the uni: but I just do not want the hassle. I suppose as a contingency it makes sense to create a shadow version on Opensim, but it is even more of a hassle to do this if we are not sure we will need to. I will add it to the to-do list...

Back to the Virtual Factory

Have sorted out the Summer's shopping list of developments. The aim is to use the simulation for the autumn MBA Operations Management class. Before then I have to develop the links with Facebook. Have put a rudimentary Facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/clemency/ Doesn't do a lot. Runs on an ASP.NET server using the SDK at http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/ Indisputably the worst documented piece of software I have ever used, and not a lot available on the web to help.