simio Archives | Page 2 of 3

Professional Development

The annual Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) starts two weeks from today. Initially as a practitioner and then later as a vendor I have attended over 20 of these conferences in addition to dozens of other...

Predicting Process Variability

Systems rarely perform exactly as predicted. A person doing a task may take six minutes one time and eight minutes the next. Sometimes variability is due to outside forces, like materials that behave differently based...

Simulation in Healthcare

Over the years, I have had several occasions to use medical facilities for myself and my family. Some visits were routine, such as for a diagnostic tests or images. Others were for much more critical...

Data Collection Basics Part 2

Last week in Data Collection Basics (Part 1) I discussed data collection, introducing the topics of identifying required data and then locating or creating that data. Once you have some data, you typically need to...

Data Collection Basics

Even though the people responsible for building models are often the “data collection people,” I know very few associates who think this is a particularly enjoyable part of their job. But data collection is a...

Simulation and Disaster Management

While the last couple months have been pretty dry where I live here in the Northeastern part of the U.S., in the Southeastern part several severe hurricanes have already hit and it looks like more...

Keep Simulation Projects Simple Too

We all have stories about company decisions that make us shake our head. If you have ever worked for a large organization, it may have seemed that some of their decisions were, shall we say,...

Keep Simulation Simple

I mentioned a while back that I am a Boy Scout. OK, maybe my boyhood days are long gone, but I still consider myself to be a Scout. I learned many lessons as a Scout;...

We Are Not Making Swiss Watches

Please bear with me while I mention three apparently unrelated topics. I have a very good friend Harry who often offers me advice. Fortunately for me, the fact that I don’t want the advice has...

Executing a Simulation Project for the Simple Minded

This week I thought I would step back and offer a somewhat light-hearted summary of some of the things we have covered. Here are five simple steps for executing a simulation project. 1. Figure out...

Well – Managed – Agility

In previous articles we discussed a definition of agility and the potential oxymoron of managed agility. I coined the phrase “well managed agility” as part of the solution. I was asked why I used the...

The Last Lecture

I am taking a break from the normal simulation topic this week to mention a significant current event – the passing of Dr. Randy Pausch. Dr. Pausch was a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University...