During the spring break from classes I went on a weekend trip to ski in Utah. This is an annual trip that I go on with my friends from college. We are mechanical engineering graduates from Purdue. Since leaving West Lafayette we’ve split into a diverse range of professional careers, including a few aircraft turbine engine engineers with GE.
My personal objectives were to have a great time with old friends, ski as much as the resorts will let me, and to return home safe. While I was taking a break from decision modeling, a friend Paul was applying it to schedule and organize our food for the weekend. I joked with him that only a rocket scientist would go to this degree in planning something as simple as food selection.
The model Paul built ensures each meal contained the basics to sustain a high energy schedule (protein, starch, fiber/green), prevented overloading our limited cooking appliances, minimized costs and leftovers, and most of all increased the satisfaction with the trip overall. Overall, the model was successful because we ate well, spent little, and had little left over.
You need history of the annual trips to understand how well this model worked at planning our diet. In our second annual trip to Seven Springs in Pennsylvania email messages got crossed and we showed up with triple the required inventory of barley beverages and no cooking utensils. This resulted in the first ski run being later than normal each day. Cell C67 refers sarcastically to this incident. Last year we consumed the entire trips worth of bananas and Chips Ahoy cookies the first day, warranting an emergency trip down the mountain to the grocery store.
Link to BUS650: Decision models can be used in a wide variety of situations. This is an example of a location you wouldn’t expect to see a formal model and also illustrates the improvements you can get by having a conversation at a deeper depth than traditionally used.
Pictures of the model are below
My personal objectives were to have a great time with old friends, ski as much as the resorts will let me, and to return home safe. While I was taking a break from decision modeling, a friend Paul was applying it to schedule and organize our food for the weekend. I joked with him that only a rocket scientist would go to this degree in planning something as simple as food selection.
The model Paul built ensures each meal contained the basics to sustain a high energy schedule (protein, starch, fiber/green), prevented overloading our limited cooking appliances, minimized costs and leftovers, and most of all increased the satisfaction with the trip overall. Overall, the model was successful because we ate well, spent little, and had little left over.
You need history of the annual trips to understand how well this model worked at planning our diet. In our second annual trip to Seven Springs in Pennsylvania email messages got crossed and we showed up with triple the required inventory of barley beverages and no cooking utensils. This resulted in the first ski run being later than normal each day. Cell C67 refers sarcastically to this incident. Last year we consumed the entire trips worth of bananas and Chips Ahoy cookies the first day, warranting an emergency trip down the mountain to the grocery store.
Link to BUS650: Decision models can be used in a wide variety of situations. This is an example of a location you wouldn’t expect to see a formal model and also illustrates the improvements you can get by having a conversation at a deeper depth than traditionally used.
Pictures of the model are below
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