Student Profile: A Winning Strategy

Krishan Soni '08
Joint degree candidate, Yale Medical School

We did a short factory simulation, called the Littlefield Simulation, in the Operations Engine class taught by Art Swersey. Art mentioned that MIT does an international operations competition, and that put the seed in our minds. A good friend of mine, Gene Lee, is excited about operations, and we both had a really good time doing Littlefield the first time around. So, we figured, why not?

In class, Art gave us the data and we had a week to play with it before the simulation actually started. For this competition, it started on Monday at noon, and we didn't have access to any data until Monday at noon. It ran for 250 simulated days over the course of 3 days. And once the factory went live, you had to analyze the data in real time, come up with all your decisions, and then move. The longer that takes, the worse you do in the competition.

The simulation asks for a few major things. One is managing your inventory. That's a relatively easy piece, given the models that Art taught us in class. The second piece is a little bit tougher. You have this factory that processes products through machines, and you need to have enough machines to process these products. But there's a trade-off. The more machines you buy, the more money it costs you. So, how many machines do you need? Another big piece was demand changes. Gene was awesome. He built a model at the very beginning, and it just predicted what the rest of the data would be for the rest of the simulation. He was just spot on.

For every order that you processed, you got a certain amount of simulated money, and your rank in the competition was based on how much cash you had at the end. In the final hours, we were thinking that it was going to be really close. We thought we might finish in the top five, but not first. And then we saw the final standings, and we had won.

That was a lot of fun. It was cool to hang out with my teammates, and it was very intense. But these are also topics that we really like to dig into.

I'm a joint degree student in the MD-MBA program, and one of the things I'm interested in is thinking about operations and healthcare. How can a patient have a good experience in the healthcare system? As a medical student, one of the things I was frustrated with is the number of patients waiting in the emergency room. You can apply the concepts from Art’s class and ask: How many nurses do you need? How should things work so it runs more efficiently?

Interviewed on April 13, 2007.