St. Petersburg- Day 6

Julie,

Today should be titled "The REAL marathon day." Holy Moly it was a long one! We started at 8am with operations and finished at 6:30pm with CCL. By the time we were done, it felt like we were staggering out of there.

Operations actually ended up being really good today. We did a simulation called the beer game which was a simulation of all of us acting as different steps in the supply chain (factory, distributor, wholesaler, retailer). It was an interesting exercise and was fun to see that it takes quite a bit of coordination to figure out demand and what is happening. For example, I went from having 10 "cases" in my inventory to -90 "cases" (back ordered) and then having over 100 in inventory as I tried to figure out how many cases my wholesaler (I was a distributor) would need and being able to have enough on hand to supply him. It was also nice because it took up a good chunk of class and made that class go a lot faster.

It was also good because the class helped me come up with a few ideas of what I want to do for my Health Sector Management concentration project. I think I am going to go with one of three ideas: 1. There is a principle called Queuing Theory which is the study and understanding of making people or things wait... as for example in a doctor's office. My idea is to do a study of alternative methods or adjustments doctors offices can do to both shorter the wait and make the wait seem shorter while keeping themselves busy.

2. My second idea has to do with applying process analysis to a medical office's billing cycle to determine flow, bottlenecks, processing rate, cycle time, and throughput time with the idea of being able to improve upon it to get dollars collected more quickly.

3. The last idea has to do with doing a cost estimation for every type of procedure seen at the office between material costs, direct labor costs, and overhead costs in order to best assess what procedures are effective and profitable and which are not.

After Operations, we had another speaker that was not much better than the others.. not better at all in fact, and that part seemed to drag on for a long time. Then came lunch and to be honest it was awful. The funny part is that it was the same food they have been serving us all week and although everyone has been complaining about the food cause there is no variation at all, I haven't worried about it too much because it has kept me on track with my workouts. So maybe it was because we had such good food the night before and there was so much variety, but to get to lunch and see another chicken dish and another fish dish was a little disheartening. Oh well it wasn't like we were throwing it up but it was the first time that I felt like it made me lose my appetite.

After lunch we had cost accounting and it was a LONG struggle to get through. I like the professor, but it was tough today. Right after that class it was already 4:15pm, but we still had a whole other class to go in CCL. It ended up going a little quicker because there is more of a discussion and he had us break out into groups quite a bit throughout, but still when it was all over I was VERY GRATEFUL.

Now that class is over for the day, I went to dinner and now I am going to study a little bit before I go to bed. Well only two more days left of this residency. Pretty crazy!

I love you very much and miss you!

Love ya,

Brock