Description

Term Project

1. SELECTING CORPORATE TRAINING PROGRAMS
1.1. Problem Environment

1.2. Potential Corporate Setting
Your OR consulting firm has been hired to design the training program for a small company for next year. There are no in-house classes, and vendors provide all training. The company has determined 41 skills, listed in Table 1, that are required to be improved for its employees. It has 13 employees (a senior manager, 2 project managers, 3 professionals, 2 sales persons, 3 technicians and 2 administrative assistants). Required skills are given in Table 2 for each position. There are 15 programs available for use; Table 3 contains the cost per person and the skills covered for each program. Enrollment costs and duration of the programs are given in Table 4. Some of the programs conflict in time with other programs. Program 1 conflicts with program 3, program 9 conflicts with program 15 and program 11 conflicts with program 12. It is company policy that each employee is limited to 15 days for training per year. In addition, at least 1 professional and 1 technician must be present at the company to continue the operations during the trainings.
*Table 1, 2, 3 and 4 are available in “Tables.xlsx” file on ODTÜClass.
a. Which training programs should be used? What is the assignment of employees to those programs? What is the total cost of assignment of employees to those programs to the company?
c. The company has the opportunity to negotiate prices for programs. Which programs would you suggest are candidates for negotiation?
d. What skills are especially expensive to cover? If the company was to develop its own programs, what skills should be covered?

2. CONDUCT
Any kind of non-ethical behavior (i.e. cheating) will be penalized. You can discuss the problem only within your teams.
3. SUBMISSION
3.1. FORMAT
Report and solution sheet format instructions are given in the following two sections.
3.1.1. Report
The main section headings should be numbered and written in capital letters. The subtitles should be written in lower case letters and underlined. All pages should be given page numbers.
3.1.2. Solution Sheet
Your solution sheet should be well organized and easy to understand at first look. You should name the columns and rows in your tables. In addition, you should explicitly show the cells corresponding to your objective function and right hand sides of the constraints. Please note that if your formulation in solver is efficient in terms of number of expressions (each constraint you define in solver) then you will receive extra points (bonus!).
3.2. CONTENT
Note that your written report should include the followings:
• Table of contents (with corresponding page numbers)
• Introduction (Briefly summarize the problem situation and what the reader should expect to find in the report. Please use your own words instead of using the question to explain the problem situation.)
• Main body of the report o The detailed explanation of the work carried out
 State all the assumptions used in your study (whether they are already given or they are your own).
 Provide a formal mathematical model formulation in closed form. Explain the decision variables (together with indices and their meanings), constraints and objective function clearly. Define any additional notation that you use.
o Discussions about your findings
 Summarize the solver outputs by using tables, figures or graphs in the body of main text.
 Clearly discuss your findings for each key question. Analyze the problem to see reasons that led to the current findings.
• Conclusions and recommendations o Very shortly, re-mention what the problem was about and what you have done. Rehighlight your most important results and discussions.
• References (list all the material referred to in the report text, if any)
• Appendix
o Include all data, tables, diagrams, drawings, etc. which are not immediately relevant to the main text in the appendix.
o Refer all the material you provide in appendices in the body of the text.