Samford Hall

Today when walking to Shelby Hall, I heard the Samford Hall bells play War Eagle.  It thought it was only on Saturdays at 12 Noon, but apparently it is every day at 12 Noon.  It's great to be in a place like Auburn where we celebrate just being who we are.

Tuesday

Today was a busy day!  I was at school by 7:15 and studying for my Warehousing class test.  The test was at 11:00 and I had a typical test day.  I knew the answer to the first question (6 points) and it took me almost 20 minutes to answer it.  I answered a few more questions and realized that I had transposed two columns on the first question so my answer was completely incorrect.  I finished the rest of the test as best I could and started over again on the first question.  My redo was not quite finished when time was up. I was exhausted.

Lunch with Wes was fun; he's so smart and I'll miss the kind of conversations we can have.  That is probably what I'll miss most about my "year off"... conversations about mathematics and modeling.  Where else can you do that except on a university campus?

I spent the rest of the afternoon (I left campus at 5:30) with "group 2" trying to get our presentation ready.  We've done a good job and just need a few more slides that give good comparative analysis of the current design with our proposed design.  We're meeting again around lunchtime tomorrow.  I'll be making the presentation on Thursday morning; I hope we're ready.

Peggy and I had nachos and margaritas for dinner.

Flag Football

The War Damn IEagle football team won our 3rd game, 34-0 last night.  We are now 3 and 0 and have beaten our opponents a total of about 100-0.  Each of our games has ended soon after halftime by the "mercy rule."  The rules for this league favor the inclusion of the female participants.  If a girl scores a touchdown the team gets 7 points instead of 6 and the extra point is worth 2 instead of 1.  After positive yardage by a guy, the play is "closed" and only a girl can advance the ball.  The 8-person team must have 4 girls on the field at all times.  The rules really make the game more fun for everyone since it cannot be dominated by the guy players.  Our final regular season game is next Wednesday and then the week after Thanksgiving the season ends with a single elimination playoff.  We will be in the playoff for the "6:30 on Wednesdays" group.  It has been such fun to get to know a group of IE graduate students in a different setting. They are all smart, athletic and fun to be with.  I'll miss this!

Tragedy

Dr. Marie Wooten was the Dean of the College of Sciences and Mathematics at Auburn.  While jogging at 5:45 on Friday morning she was hit by a car and she died of her injuries.  I spent one-on-one time with her at the COSAM tailgate before the Arkansas game and again at the Tiger Talk dinner at Arricia before the LSU game.  She was a lovely woman; a bright and intelligent educator with a passion for advancing opportunities for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).  It is a sad time for everyone at Auburn; we will miss her.

Project Progress

Our project for the Aflac distribution center is coming together.  We've compared all of the data given to us and found discrepancies among the files, but we've made some assumptions to make up for the errors. 

We've analyzed the current situation and found that they are assigning their items to locations based on equal amounts of space for each item.  While this is probably the easiest method for the warehouse personnel, it is not the best way when it comes to minimizing the cost of restocking.  The optimal methodology for assigning items to locations is to use available volume in the warehouse space, and have each item "bid" on the space.  Items are assigned locations based on a formula that uses the number of picks per year and the size of the item (12"x9.5"x11.6" box) to determine the cubic inches moved in a year.  It can be proven mathematically that this formula is the most cost effective method for "slotting" items in a warehouse, but few companies use it.  They do things like they've always done them!

We've found the optimal slotting for each item that has been requested in the five months of data we were given and produced a "Birds Eye View" of the activity in the warehouse as we found it and in our proposed item assignment model.  For this part of the project we need to create some graphs that pictorially represent the cost savings to Aflac.

The two students who are taking the course from off campus are working on the latest possible cut-off time for priority orders.  Since Aflac is a national company the current cutoff time of 10 AM Eastern Time is not very fair to California agents, since that translates to 7 AM Pacific Time.  They are confident that they'll have a solution by tomorrow.

The final area we need to explore is a problem for our team.  The current item slotting causes congestion among the pickers and we need to be able to show that our design does not cause congestion.  We've unsuccessfully worked on a program to simulate the picking process and have abandoned that strategy.  I think we're going to have to mathematically prove it.  We have a paper that our professor wrote about this issue that I think can be applied to our situation.  I hope so since we have our second test a week from Tuesday and our preliminary presentation is due a week from Thursday.