Office: 563-588-7725, Dale.Lehman@loras.edu
Class meets online Wednesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM
"All models are wrong, some are useful." (W. Edwards Deming)
This course aims to develop abilities to build spreadsheet models and analyze the inherent uncertainty in modeling business decision problems. The goal is to improve decision-making by increasing the awareness and analysis of variability. The course will use Excel and @Risk software extensively. This is a quantitative course, not a mathematics course. The emphasis is on application and use of these tools, including the presentation of results.
We will be using my textbook Practical Spreadsheet Risk Modeling Using @Riskt (Lehman and Groenendaal, CRC Press, 2019). The book comes with a software license for @Risk. This software is an Excel add-in, so you will need to have Excel.
WARNING: @Risk works with Windows machines, but not Macs.. If you have a Mac, you can run @Risk via Bootcamp (or equivalent).
There will be a significant number of homework problems, comprising your course grade. This includes the grades on your attempted answers to the problems as well as your participation in the class discussion of the answers. Homework is due at the assigned time - late homework is accepted for half credit (even after we go over it in class).
Introduction and Simulation: chapters 1,2
Choosing Distributions: chapter 3
Modeling Relationships: chapter 4
Time Series Modeling: chapter 5
Various topics, including Frequency Severity Analysis: chapter 6
Optimization: chapter 7
Specific homework assignments, models, lecture notes, etc. appear on the course eLearn site and are subject to change (at my discretiion).