MBA Masterclass Managing Service Operations

Kara Northcutt: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us. We'll start in just a couple minutes, takes a little bit for everybody to join at the Zoom webinar but so glad to have you here with us. And feel free if you wanna let us know in the chat box where you're joining us from; I am downtown Chicago, so one of our Chicago campuses called the Gleacher Center. So if you look at my virtual background, that river behind me is currently dyed bright green. So it's a tradition here in Chicago around the St. Patrick's holidays. They dye it green on typically the Saturday before St. Patrick's Day, which is the 17th here in the U.S. And it stays pretty green for a few days, so it's always kind of fun to see. So, nice to see that tradition kind of restart here as things have progressed positively pandemic-wise for the most part here in the area. Well, great: We've got great representation: Pitzemburg... And Amy, are you in Chicagoland?

Professor Amy Ward: I am in Chicago.

Kara: Great.

Professor Ward: I saw the dyed-green river a couple days ago.

Kara: Yeah it's fun, it's nice to see; it's a fun process to see even if you... The nice thing about being a Boothie as well, I will say, you have the best view. Our campus literally overlooks where they dye it, you can avoid the crowds a little bit. So when you have that student access to our campus, it's a nice little hidden perk. New York. I'll be out in New York soon for a full-time admin reception. We're very excited to hit the road again on the admission side. Lagos, wonderful. And then again for everyone that's just joining, we'll start in just a minute; just wanna give everybody a chance to get logged in and get settled. Great, lots of representation globally, this is great. OK, I'll give it about 30 to 45 more seconds. And I know we're using the chat right now but throughout, and I'll mention this again, we'll use the Q&A for like very topical questions that you want to pose during the session, and for the Q and A we'll do toward the end. But I'll keep an eye on both of course as we go throughout the session today. I see quite a few, Texas, that's great. OK, looks like we're leveling out a little bit with participants and I wanna be of course mindful of everyone's time. So -- excuse me -- my name is Kara Northcutt. I'm a Senior Director of Admissions here at Chicago Booth. And on behalf of the executive full-time, evening, and weekend admissions teams, I'm thrilled to welcome you to today's Masterclass, Managing Service Operations with Professor Amy Ward. A key part of the Booth experience is our supportive and collaborative community. So when you join a place like Chicago Booth, you're gonna have a group of current students, alumni, administrators like myself and my colleagues that are really here to help you throughout the entire experience personally, professionally to make sure you hopefully have a great and impactful experience. And an integral part of that community is of course the faculty, who do truly become part of your network as well as you go through the program and beyond the program in many cases as well. So we're really excited today for you to get a sense of the faculty, our teaching methods, and with a snippet of one of our classes that is offered across the various programs. And we're also joined today by a Chicago Booth PhD student, Yueyang Zhong. So as I mentioned before, feel free to use the Q&A -- especially for like topical questions about what Professor Ward is speaking about. Yueyang will be responding to those, I'll keep an eye on it, and then after the formal presentation part, we'll do an open Q&A. I'll read some of the more common questions and do an open dialogue between myself and Professor Ward at the end. OK? So that's just a little bit of housekeeping but feel free to chat me anytime if you're confused about anything. OK. So Professor Amy Ward is a Rothman Family Professor of Operations Management and Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow. Amy Ward's research focuses on the approximation and control of stochastic systems, with applications to the service industry. Much of her past work has focused on the impact of customer impatience and abandonments on performance. Her recent work investigates the interactions between behavioral incentives and operational efficiency in service systems. So you'll hear obviously more about that today and I will post Professor Ward's full bio in the chat here in a second. But with that, I will turn it over to Professor Ward now. Thank you so much for doing this today.

Professor Ward: Thank you, Kara. I think that was a very fancy way of saying that I like service operations, I don't like to wait. And so it's definitely in my personal interest to be able to run service operations more efficiently. OK: So this is kind of an example-first class. And I ask -- an article, there was an article to think about before class. And the article was this tube station, and there's a lot of congestion at the tube station, there's rush hour. And the question is, how do I think about getting the maximum number of people to depart this station? Because the more people that I can depart this station, the less wait time we have after we get off the tube and we get to the elevator, and elevator/escalator, and then we have to sort of wait at the escalator to get out. Now in this article it says there's this idea that like, if you have people stand-stand -- and I don't know what culture you are from but like for me, certainly in Chicago in the CTA stations, if I'm using one of the CTA trains and there's an escalator, it's very strongly ingrained in my head that one side I stand on and if I'm in a hurry, the other side I walk. And so when I read this article and it says something about, "Well, we can get more capacity out of the station and people won't have to wait as much, we can depart more people per time unit if we have both people stand," that felt very strange to me and that's sort of why I was intrigued by the article. And so let me just start with a question from you guys, for you guys, and Kara said she would run the poll for me which is, the poll is: Is stand-stand a good idea?

Kara: Amy, are you able to see? I've launched it but I'm not, are you able to see the ...

Professor Ward: I am not able to see it.

-Kara: ... activity? I apologize, I'm not sure; let me try.

Professor Ward: If you can just report the poll results to us, that works just fine.

Kara: Unfortunately, they're not showing. Let me just try one more time.

Professor Ward: And I think there's some people in the chat saying they don't see the poll.

-Kara: I'll see if we can put it in the chat. Maybe if everyone could just respond in the chat to the question. I apologize, but the -- it's just grayed out, the poll. I apologize. A lot of responses in the chat there.

Professor Ward: Oh, I think I was able to relaunch the poll. Will that work?

Kara: There we go, thank you! And you can let me know if you need me to end it, Amy.

Professor Ward: OK, so I think we have -- nah, let me give it one second. There's still people, I noticed the numbers are still changing, so... OK, this is a good uniform number to start on. So I've got 70 percent saying yes and 30 percent saying no. Oh sorry, it just changed to 71-29. OK so now, I think you can share to see the results. I'm gonna stop sharing the results or you can trust me. And now I'm gonna do a slightly awkward transition because I want to share my iPad. So let's see how that is gonna go. Share content. Let's see if we're sharing screen. OK so hopefully... Good, we're seeing the Notability page. OK, so we asked: Is stand-stand a good idea? The question was, is stand-stand a good idea? And for yes, we had -- I think the final one was 71 percent that said yes. And for no, we had 29 percent was the final that said no. And I'll apologize in advance for my handwriting. So now my question to you, and I'll let Kara monitor the hands, is: Can you tell me why did you say yes or no? And I encourage a lot of participation here. I'd like us to have a, I don't know, at least a 10-minute discussion about whether or not stand-stand is a good idea.

- [Kara] Yeah, so we're using the chat. If you just wanna write in the chat, that way myself and Professor Ward can all use responses. So feel ready to post a question, excuse me, responses into the chat. So the raise-hand function isn't the best way to do this 'cause we can't put you guys on audio unfortunately by the way this is set up.

Professor Ward: OK so we'll do this in the chat. So I'm looking at the chat.

Kara: There you go, perfect.

Professor Ward: And you're gonna have to give me a little bit more time. So I wanna write down -- so Alexander, you say it... Ooh this is incredibly fast. OK, so Jay? Jay says, is a yes -- and I'm afraid I'm gonna have to get sort of a random sampling of the answers here -- that yes, it's a good idea because it is more efficient. And what else? OK: So Carlos, you say, "Well, it goes against culture." So I think that's a no. So that's a no, because it goes against culture. And so, culture can be kind of hard to change. And Charles, I think you're also a no. I think you're saying it's not feasible, just not feasible to implement this. OK: What else? I'm going to kind of go backwards and look -- what other answers. OK I see, "A short-term pain for long-term gain." So I think this is a yes. Short-term pain for long-term gain. And so if I think about the short-term pain for long-term gain answer, I think one thing we're thinking is that, "Gosh, you know, here I am -- I really wanna walk, I'm late to work, I'm ready to walk, I'm gonna go fast up that escalator and I can't do it." If you implement stand-stand, it means that I can't do it. So it's a little bit like, I'm experiencing some pain there. It's a little bit unfair to me. And I think this echoes John's answer, which is sacrificing throughput to let people in a hurry move more quickly is a worthwhile tradeoff -- Oh, sorry! John is on the opposite side. OK. So what I was gonna say with the short-term pain for long-term gain is that, OK, so what we're doing is there are individually a few people that will not have as good experience. Because I was getting off that train, I was expecting that I could charge up that escalator, I can make my interview on time, I'm late, I'm worried about this. Now you do stand-stand and me, individually, I don't get to go as fast. But there's this idea that overall on average, the wait time for the average person is not as long. So that's why we might prefer this even though at an individual level, every single individual is not necessarily optimized for it; I'm sort of doing this for the good of society. And I think this is what John's point was getting to, sacrificing some throughput to let people in a hurry move more quickly is a worthwhile tradeoff. I think John is saying this point that I was just trying to make is, well, for every individual it might not be quite as good. There's gonna be some of us that are annoyed at this because we were all charged up to -- we're late, we're in a hurry, we're rushing, and we're prevented from stand-standing. But it's only a few of us, so it's a worthwhile tradeoff as maybe we sacrifice a few for the overall good. OK, and I think I see another one from Tyler that is interesting: "Depends on what we are trying to maximize." If throughput, stand-stand. So yes, so Tyler is a yes, if maximizing throughput. But if the customer experience is what we're trying to maximize, maybe not. So maybe it's a no if objective is to maximize customer experience. And I think that's a really good point here because whenever I ask a question like, "Is stand-stand a good idea?" there's this idea in the back of my head that there's an objective. And I didn't actually tell you what my objective was. But in the back of a head here, there's the objective. And the article says, "Hey, if we're maximizing throughput, then yes, absolutely stand-stand." But there are all these other things going on and if I'm thinking about customer experience or satisfaction, there's certainly gonna be some of these people that wanna walk that aren't able to walk, and they may not have the best experience. OK. So there's quite a few things we're trying to take into play, take into consideration. And one thing, let me go off this: If I look at all the yes answers, the group of the yes answers are around the idea -- and I just see one more in the chat, "Alleviating one bottleneck may create bottlenecks elsewhere in the system." And Michael, you're exactly right. So I'm just focused on right now, our bottleneck here is the escalators. If we solve this bottleneck, we may have to solve another bottleneck. But I'll focus on solving this one first or thinking about this one first. OK: So if I kind of group the yes answers, the yes answers are, OK, something around, "This is good for throughput." If I kind of have to put a theme to the no answers, the no answers are around the bit that like, "Well, this is different than culture, this may go against what people are expecting, this may be hard to implement." So nobody's actually questioned whether or not the article is correct. The article tells us that they did this experiment and stand-stand meant that they could depart more people per unit time -- so say per minute or per hour -- from that tube station. And it seems like it'd be nice if we could verify this. So what I'd like to do next is to have, do some calculations to compare these two designs. And so let's think about this. We have a Design A and we have a Design B. And Design A is how... is what we're proposing: Design A is this stand-stand idea that we're proposing. And Design B is this idea that on one side, I walk and on one side, I stand. So Design B should be what we are more familiar with. One way to evaluate the two designs is to calculate the capacity. So if I'm gonna calculate the capacity, what I want you to imagine, this is the maximum possible throughput for each design. So you can imagine a train that lets out a very large, an infinitely large number of people. And that means that I always have people waiting to go up the escalator. And so one way to evaluate how good this design is, is with this infinite number of people waiting to go up the escalator. I could ask myself, "Can I depart more people per minute with Design A or can I depart more people per minute with Design B?" And that's gonna tell me about which will have a higher throughput. And so that's basically the calculation we're gonna make to see if we can sort of verify what the article says, that stand-stand is a better idea. 'Cause they say something about, "You shouldn't trust everything you read," so I'm not trusting everything I read. OK: So in order to do this we need a few facts. And the facts I'm going to assume. So let's look at facts, is that there is a 30-degree slope. So the escalator has this 30-degree slope and that implies escalator length is 48 meters. So it told us in the article that the vertical height was 24 meters; I have a 30-degree slope; I do some geometry, algebra calculations; I get that my escalator total length should be 48 meters. The other thing I need to know is how deep are these escalator steps. And you can look that up. I looked at this reference page, it was CityMetric that tells me some information about city stats like how many steps are on escalators. And it tells me escalator steps are eight inches deep. OK, so what does that mean? Twenty-four meters is 945 inches. So 945 inches divided by eight gives me 118 steps. The 24 meters converting to 945 inches, that was given to me in the article. What about average escalator speeds? So average escalator speed is three-fourths, 0.75 meters per second. And I also need to know an average walking speed. So people walk up steps at about 0.7 meters per second. So walkers traverse the escalator at -- so there should be 0.7 plus 0.75 meters per second. So that's gonna be 1.45 meters per second. So these are the facts I need to know to compare these two designs. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna compare the maximum impossible departure rate -- or the capacity of Design A -- to the maximum possible departure rate or the capacity of Design B. Is it clear what I want to do? Any questions? Great. OK: So let's look at Design A. And I only have one iPad screen, so I apologize; I have to kind of move it up. Design A is my stand-stand. All right. So we said escalator speed is 3/4 meters per second, or 4/3 seconds per meter. And I've got 48 meters. So this tells me 64 seconds for an escalator cycle. I've got 118 steps -- and I'm gonna pack people in like sardines, so I'm gonna assume that every step has a person on it. So what does that tell me? Every 64 seconds, 118 plus 118 -- 'cause I'm doing stand-stand and I'm packing everybody in like sardines -- is 236 people can be transported from bottom to top. And so we have 236 divided by 64 seconds. This is 3.69 people departing per second. Or if I wanna multiply by 60 -- 'cause it just seems a little bit nicer number -- 3.69 times 60 gives me 221 people per minute. And this, oops, this is my capacity. OK. So Design A, the capacity is 221 people per minute. Now I wanna do the same calculation to Design B and I wanna understand, does Design B have higher capacity or lower capacity? Now according to the article, Design A should have higher capacity than Design B. Because Design B is my walk-stand, and the article is telling us Design A is gonna give us that higher throughput or that higher capacity. OK, so let's look at Design B. So I'm gonna move my screen up here; keep 221 in your head. So I have Design B. And what is my walker's speed on an escalator? Walker speed on escalator -- that's not written very well. Es-ca-la-tor ... can I write? Walker speed on escalator, so it was 1.45 meters per second, is 0.69 seconds per meter. So maybe I should say this is: 1 divided by 1.45 is 0.69 seconds per meter. So what does that tell me? Time for walker to go from bottom to top is -- so it's got 0.69 seconds per meter times 48 meters was my length. So that is 33.12 seconds. And we should kind of verify: 33.12, that is less than 64. So if I'm walking up the escalator, we're about twice as fast as if you're just standing. OK, so now how many people walking? Well if I think about people walking, when we were standing, I assumed that I could just pack people in like sardines and I would have two people on every step, or if I just look at it, you know, one person on every step -- sorry, two people on every step -- one person if I only look at half of the escalator. So if I'm just looking at half of the escalator, the walking side, it seems unreasonable to expect that we're all walking exactly in sync with each other so that I can really have walkers on every single step of the escalator. That feels a bit much. It's probably sort of like, "Well, here's a walker, and then maybe here's a walker, and then maybe there's an empty step and here's a walker." So there's some kind of spacing that's happening. And you know, I don't know exactly what the right spacing is but I'm gonna guess it's something like 1.5 steps per people. So it's on average maybe, there's three steps for two people, or opposite, 1.5 steps per people. Sorry, three steps for two people would give me 1.5 steps per person. So then that means that every 33.12 seconds -- so I've got 118 steps divided by 1.5 steps per people. And so that gives me 78 and two-thirds people can be transported from bottom to top. So what does that mean? And so we've got 78 and two-thirds people divided by 33.12 -- that's the time to get from bottom to top -- so that tells me I've got 2.37 people per second. Or if I multiply by 60, I'm gonna get 142.2 people per minute. So if I look at the capacity of Design B, my capacity is 142.2 people per minute. Now that's just for the side that I have people walk on. So actually if I wanna look at the total capacity, total capacity should be the walkers plus the standers. We calculated the standers, so 221 divided by 2 standers plus 142.2 walkers. So this is gonna give me a total of 252.7 people per minute. OK! So we've calculated this: 252.7 people per minute, this is my walk-stand. In Design A, I calculated 221 people per minute, that was my stand-stand. So 221 stand-stand is less than 252.7 -- sorry, I shouldn't have circled this, it is this one in red. And at this point we're thinking, "Well OK, that's interesting; we've just made a calculation that's different than the article." The article told us that stand-stand was better than stand-walk and if we said that there was any reason to implement stand-stand, it was because the sort of summary of your answers was that, well, there's more capacity, there's more throughput with stand-stand. Did I make a mistake? What's going on here? Is the article wrong? Ah, yes. OK: So I see several people in the chat and you're saying, and several of your answers say something along the lines of, "But how many people are walking?" And you're exactly right. So when I made that calculation, somewhere in the background, that's the total capacity IF -- so what is this? -- 142.2, these are my walkers, divided by 252.7, that's my total capacity. 56 percent choose to walk. So to utilize all the capacity, I have to have 56 percent of the people choosing to walk. And now we're thinking about that article, and we're thinking about this -- I think it said something about some of these tube stations, they're really buried pretty far below the ground; and the escalator is pretty long; and we're thinking maybe you're tired; you're looking up at that long escalator and you're thinking, "Gosh, wow, maybe I don't wanna walk." And so now you're looking at my calculations and you're saying, "Wow, is it really fair to assume that 56 percent of the people are going to want to walk?" Now of course, maybe there's health benefits to walking, but I guess that's a different issue if we wanna have a campaign to sort of get more people to walk. Let's just take what people are doing at the moment. And I'm with you, Vishfesh, 56 percent does seem very high... OK. So let's reframe this question and we're gonna ask, "What if F -- F being my fraction of people that choose to walk -- less than 56 percent choose to walk? So I wanna rethink this capacity calculation. So let's say we have X people per minute that are arriving here. This is from the trains coming, they've dumped off people. And let's say some fraction, F of them, are choosing to walk and some fraction, one-minus-F of them, are choosing to stand. OK, so people don't disappear on escalators. They don't appear, or maybe they do, but I'm not a magician. So if nobody's disappearing, nobody's reappearing, if X people per minute are arriving an F are choosing to walk, I've got XF that are departing on the walk side per minute, and I've got X times one-minus-F that are departing on the stand side per minute. And we've done some calculations, so we know that if it's on the walk side, X times F has to be less than or equal to 142.2 people per minute, because that was our capacity of the walk side: that was the maximum possible departure rate on the walk side. And we also did that calculation on the stand side. So on the stand side, we know X times one-minus-F has to be less than or equal to -- so 221 divided by two -- so this was 110.5 people per minute. So I can think about this. So if I think about that fraction F, so equivalently, the X has to be less than equal to 142.2 divided by F and the X has to be less than equal to 110.5 divided by one-minus-F. So the total number of people that can arrive per minute, that can depart per minute -- that is my throughput, that's my variable X here -- it has to satisfy two constraints. It has to be less than or equal to 142.2 divided by F, and it has to be less than or equal to 110.5 divided by one-minus-F. So X has to be less than or equal to the minimum of 142.2 divided by F, and 110.5 divided by one-minus-F. So what's gonna happen if less then 56 percent of the people want to walk? I'm gonna have wasted capacity on the stand side. If less than 56 percent of the people wanna walk then -- oh sorry, on the walk side, wasted capacity on the walk side -- then we're gonna be completely maxing out the capacity of the stand side but gonna be wasting capacity on the walk side. So that's a problem. And we could graph this. So to sort of understand a little bit better what's going on -- I'm circling this in pink -- we can graph this, and I've done that. And now I'm gonna have to switch, reshare the screen. So if you'll give me just a second to stop sharing -- stop sharing on one device and share on a different device, let's see what happens. OK, so screen two. Can you see "Design Comparison" slide? Great. OK, so that's what we just calculated. We did this design comparison; we compared capacity of Design A, Design B; we said, "Oh, that's weird. Design B looks like it has more capacity." Then we said, "Oh, but that's only if 56 percent of the people choose to walk." Some of you commented that like, "Ooh, that seems kind of large." And so we said, "Well, let's redo this calculation for the walk-stand because not everybody's gonna wanna walk, that means we're gonna have some wasted capacity on the walk side." So what happens when we do that? So I'm graphing. So the x-axis here is the fraction choosing to walk; the y-axis is the people per minute in terms of the maximum possible people per minute that I can depart. So this is my capacity or my maximum possible throughput. Now for Design A, it is stand-stand. So for Design A, the capacity completely does not depend on how many people choose to walk. And so that is just a constant line. For this other line I've graphed, this line I've graphed is the last bit of the calculation on the iPad that was the minimum of 142.2 divided by F, and 110.5 divided by one-minus-F. So I am graphing here the capacity of the walk-stand side. And what you can see is that the fraction choosing to walk, so the capacity of the walk-stand side, is increasing -- as it should -- as the percentage of people choosing to walk increases. And it is increasing to the maximum capacity we computed which was, this is 252.7. So it is increasing to this 252.7. And there is something wrong with my slides because if you notice, this horizontal line at 222, that's decidedly not at 222, that's at 260-something. So we're gonna have to do a little pretending. What's 221? -- 221, this was the capacity of my stand-stand side, so I apologize for this -- 221 is right about where my cursor is. So 221 is right about where my cursor is and what you can see is that Design A is preferred when the fraction choosing to walk is less than a certain amount. So when the fraction choosing to walk is such that the Design A capacity is greater than the Design B capacity, Design A is gonna be preferred. And Design B is going to be preferred when the Design B capacity, the stand-stand capacity, is greater than the stand-walk capacity. So that's happening over here. So I apologize here, this is, this is not working. So the Design B, the stand-walk, is only preferred when the percentage of people who want to walk is great enough. So I have this marked at 50 percent -- and I'm gonna assume that should be 50 percent, not 0.5 percent -- that when the fraction of people choosing to walk is around 50 percent, that is exactly where this horizontal line intersects this line, and that's where we're gonna switch from wanting to do stand-stand, to wanting to do stand-walk. And the reason we switch is because we have enough people that are choosing to walk. Does that make sense from a calculation point of view? Apologizing for my completely wrong placement of the Design A capacity; 221 is about here in the slides, it is not where the line shows. Do we agree that Design A is better when fraction A, choosing to walk, is small? Design B is better when fraction choosing to walk is larger? OK: So you can nitpick at some of the assumptions I made. I think one thing you can think about is, "Wow, to make those capacity calculations, she made a lot of assumptions. She assumed average walking speed; she assumed how long the escalator was; she assumed on the walking side how much space there would be between walkers." And I don't know. You know, I had to make some reasonable assumptions. And if we made different assumptions we would, of course get a different calculation. But what would be very robust and what would stay is this idea that you would find some point F, and below that F, you would find that a Design A where you have stand-stand is gonna give you more capacity. And above that F, when more people choose to walk, you would find that a walk-stand will give you more capacity. And that does actually align with the article. Because remember, the article was thinking about this in particular on tube stations where the escalators were very long. And when the escalators are very long, that's when we would expect that not as many people are going to choose the walk option; that's when we would expect that we have more wasted capacity on the walk side. OK: So I'm gonna return to the question I asked you at the beginning. And our calculations show that this stand-stand can be better for long escalators where fewer people will choose to walk. And we're thinking about a tube station that has a long escalator, so we're expecting fewer people to choose to walk. Would you -- let's go back to that question of, would you implement it? We now agree that stand-stand, the article's correct; it's a long tube station, throughput is gonna be better. You're now in charge, you're in charge of the London Tube. Would you do this? And I'll ask you to write your answers in the chat, which at the moment I can't see. But maybe Kara or Yueyang, can you?

Kara: yes, I can jump in. So far, they're coming in fast as you know but the vast majority saying yes. Some said depends like, on the length, like in London it being a little bit longer. I'd say maybe four or five no's, and so I'd say like 85 percent are saying yes. And Yueyang if you're seeing differently, let me know.

Professor Ward: OK so let me, I'm gonna go to the no's since that's the smaller bit. Can you tell me why you would not implement it? We've just made a calculation; it is clearly more efficient to have people stand-stand.

Kara: So for anyone who said no, feel free to post in the chat. "I would not implement it due..." Oh man, these come in so fast as you know. One second.

Yueyang Zhong: "I think it would depend on the percentage of long and short escalators that exists."

Professor Ward: Ah, OK. I need to make my question more specific. We are looking at a tube station with a long escalator. So you're charged with, would you implement this in the stations with the long escalators? So you don't have to implement it at all of the stations, you can just implement in the stations with the long escalators.

Yueyang: Let's see, yes and no.

Professor Ward: And so for those of you that said no, let me follow up. There was a, "No, you know, I'm not gonna implement this in all the stations; it matters whether it's short or long." I totally agree with you. So if I say, will you implement it just for the stations with the long escalators? I'm gonna have to pick on the no's again. You know this is more efficient, are you still a no?

Kara: Yeah, some are saying, there's some sticking with no. "There's value in consistency" was one of the comments.

Professor Ward: Ah, OK: Let me pick up on value with consistency. Yeah, so let's think about how this goes. So you're telling me value and consistency that I'm a commuter -- and I should remember that I'm afraid I don't know my London stations well enough to do this credibly -- but at the Victoria Station, it's a really long escalator and so there, I need to remember that I stand-stand. But at another station at Winchester it's a short escalator, so I can walk. And you know that's really asking a lot of me as the commuter. Am I really gonna remember, like, which stations I have to walk-stand at, at which stations I have to stand... which stations I can walk at and which age stations I have to stand at? That sounds like confusion! So let me switch this to the yeses. The yeses, can you tell me why would you implement this? And if you could just -- or maybe I should not say why -- how would you implement this? I'm assuming your why is that you've seen this as a more efficient design. So you've seen this as a more efficient design, the article told you it was a more efficient design; we did the calculations; we supported the calculations by understanding that when I have a long escalator I'm gonna waste some capacity if I do walk-stand -- so if I wanna use all my capacity I really need to implement stand-stand. And so, I'm assuming that's why you're telling me, "Yes, let's go ahead and implement this." So let's say we've made this decision, "Yes, we're gonna implement it." How are you going to implement it?

Kara: "Free train ride once a month," popped up. "A fare credit ... bring more awareness." Sorry, you guys know how these things pop up. "Bring in awareness to people showing its benefits."

Professor Ward: OK, well so let's start with a couple. So free train ride once a month. What was the other one? Fare credit?

Kara: Yeah, fare credit ... color coding was mentioned as well just recently.

Professor Ward: Oh, let me start with those two. So it sounds to me like you're going to try to incentivize behavior. You're going to watch people, and when you see people standing, you're gonna say, "Great, good job. Let me encourage, let me give you some discounts." Now here I am, I'm late to work and I really don't care. I don't care that you're giving me incentives; I am still gonna walk up those stairs. Do you punish me? Do you rely on the fact -- somebody else said color coding. So you've done a nice educational job. You've done some color coding; you've said very clearly; you've got red down on your floors, red means "NO WALK." The signs? Very good, informational signs. I completely ignore them. I'm like, "Yeah OK, whatever. I need to walk, I'm late. I'm walking." What do you do?

Kara: There's a comment, "Expecting people to remember is not practical, so using floor signs or color coding should be used to incentivize a behavior. You need a campaign to promote benefits of the change." So few along those lines.

Professor Ward: So you, I'm totally with you. OK, so we have to educate people. We do a campaign to promote the benefits of the change. And I explain to you in my campaign, "I have done these calculations. I've done these calculations and I promise you it is better for everybody. My calculations have come out, it is better for everybody if we do stand-stand. So please, for the good of society, for the good of the people in this tube, will you please stand?" So I'm doing a great job with that educational campaign. And here I go: Here's Amy and I am walking. What do you do? Do you trust that appealing to my better nature I'm gonna say, "Oh, right. OK. I'll stop now. I'll stand."

Kara: There's a comment I'm putting, "Divider in escalators, signs about the benefits."

Professor Ward: Do you find me? Because I am walking when I should be standing?

Kara: Someone says, "No, I would not punish the people as the other people in the crowd would probably get the outliers to follow the rules like in other scenarios."

Professor Ward: Ah, OK. So this is great! You wouldn't punish because you think that the other people might help you. And that's a really good example of, I'm gonna call it -- there are two ways we can think about enforcing this behavior. One is you enforce it with the carrot-stick approach. I'm gonna call that a sort of normative control. That is you're gonna incentivize me to stand, you're gonna find me if I don't stand: something very, I'll say, kind of tangible and punishable to enforce my behavior. The other way, you said, "Maybe I could rely on other people." The other way is like, let's think about the culture. There's positive advantages to peer pressure. And you're gonna say, "Well, I'm gonna take advantage of the positive example of peer pressure, where if I've done a good job with my educational campaign and people understand that stand-stand is really the way to go here, then when Amy decides to walk -- and the other people and the station give her that look -- I'm gonna feel pretty embarrassed and I'm gonna feel pretty ashamed and I'm gonna stand." So that's an idea, like an instrumental control, you can call it an instrumental control. And the instrumental control is really thinking about how do we change the culture? How do we, I'll say, use peer pressure in a positive way? And so, it doesn't involve any money but it can be very effective if done right, if done well: It's hard to get it right. OK. So if I wanna summarize this discussion -- 'cause I wanna summarize and then just say a little bit more about the class -- what we did in this discussion, we started out with this stand-stand or stand-walk and we said, "OK, well let's do the calculations." We did the calculations, we say, "OK: Stand-walk is better as long as that escalator is long, so that not many people are choosing to walk, meaning you're wasting capacity." So now we go to those long tube stations and we say, "OK, we wanna be more efficient; we wanna be more efficient, so we're gonna implement this stand-stand." And now we talk about how are we gonna implement the stand-stand -- and we realize that to implement it, it really relies on our customers, on people's behavior. So it relies on customers kind of doing what we want them to do when we don't have control over them. They're not our employees. You know, if it's a tube employee, we can tell them what to do; if it's a rider, they're a customer. I don't have control over them in the same way, so I have to somehow incentivize their behavior -- which is a little bit, I'll say, awkward because their behavior affects the efficiency of my process. And so the reason I chose this example as something for us to discuss, is I think that's the interesting and the awkwardness about service operations is you can do all the calculations you want in terms of maximizing efficiency. But if your customer isn't with you -- because the customer is intimately involved in that service delivery process -- it just may not go according to your calculations. So my next slide here, "Why is this Example Representative of Service Operations?" It's representative because it illustrates the point that to run an efficient service operation, you have to take into account how the customer is gonna behave in that service operation. And if you think about it, we looked at it like there was this process, and this process is basically like stand-stand versus stand-walk. And at a very abstract level anytime you do operations, you're thinking there's some kind of input and there's some kind of output, and there's something that happens in between. And we did this calculation -- very, very simple, the input is people getting off the tube, the output is people that have gone up the escalator and are departing the station. And we said, "What's the best way to get them from departing their train to out of the station?" Now if you think about service operations in particular and you compare it to sort of, I'll say, "regular operations," the service operations is focusing on this part where the customer is really intimately involved in the service experience. And I think a lot of times when you think about, I'll call them, "regular operations," it's really sort of a product and you're thinking, "How do I transform raw materials into a finished product?" And there's a bunch of machines operating here, and you don't quite have the same customer behavior interacting with the process. Now I've given you two extremes. You're rarely gonna see a business that's pure product or pure service: They're really a mix. If I'm thinking about similarities and differences, I would say the two key differences -- well, one is what I've been talking about, the customer involvement that I kind of pushed on this tube example. That we have this customer involvement, and because the customer is involved in delivering the service, somehow like, just flat out doing efficiency calculations aren't quite the whole story. The other bit is this inventory management. So I think another key difference is, if I'm thinking about a manufacturing-type situation, I can build up inventory, I can manufacture, I can build up inventory in order to smooth out kind of demand fluctuations. So I have seasonality in Christmas, I build up inventory to make sure I can meet the Christmas supply. But if I'm thinking about service operations, I can't really say, "Oh, you know, I'm just gonna build up inventory of, what? People, so that they can go up the escalator?" Like, I don't even know how to phrase that question; I just can't build up inventory in the same way. And so that means I really have to be much more attuned to the fluctuations and demands that are hitting the business. OK. And so why service operations? So one of the reasons we're thinking about service operations is that it's certainly been a growth industry for the U.S. over the past 20, 30 years. About the class. So this particular class, it's a mix of case discussions and lectures on kind of the more technical material. And the way the class is kind of run is very similar to what you just saw, which is there's an interactive part where we sort of ask questions, and there's a part where I just kind of lecture and I do a calculation and I try to go back and forth between the two. Because ideally if you think about it, our calculation supported the interaction we had because the calculation was, "Now I know what's most efficient -- well, if the customers behave the way I want them to." And then we get to have a discussion about, OK, well how do we manage that part of the process? And in terms of topics covered, so you saw an example of basic kind of process capacity and improving a process design; this was a simple design, we'll do it for more complicated situations. We'll also talk about customer wait time. So if you think about what I do in my time outside of class, I'm always thinking about how to reduce customer wait time. So there's ways to predict how long customers wait. Quality is always an issue in service processes so we'll think about how do we deal with quality, that'll be a bit on statistical process control. I said there's not inventory in service processes; that's not complete true, it's not always one or the other. So you have a business, people want to buy things from you, there is some inventory, so we will talk a little bit about inventory. We'll talk about revenue, how to maximize revenue. So what I'm thinking in the back of my head here is when you fly and sometimes you get a different seat price than the person sitting next to you, how does that happen? And throughout the entire bit we're gonna be thinking about employee and customer behavior. Because the employee and customer behavior is very much part of the service delivery process. Right. So the last, Kara gave me a nice introduction but I, I'll tell you a little bit about me and then we can move on -- I think we're about at the end of the hour -- to any open Q&A. I did a PhD at Stanford Engineering in 2001. Before Booth, I was at AT&T Bell Laboratories. That's what I was doing during my, that supported me through my PhD. I've also been a professor at Georgia Tech Engineering and USC Marshall School of Business. This is my fourth year at Booth. I am super happy here and I really love it here. I care about service operations because I am a customer and so if I can improve service quality and efficiency, that improves my life. And what I do outside of class -- I've alluded a couple times to -- I'm trying to reduce waiting. So if you want recent application examples, platform matching. So you think about like an Airbnb: How do you match sort of the customer demand? How do you price to match the customer demand with the products offered? Contact centers, I thought a lot about how many people do you need to staff so that people don't hang up on you and abandon? Market making: Yueyang that is also on this call, we did a project with a market-making firm that was about sort of how do you trade orders on the limit order book? So that that's a little bit of a kind of really fast summary. And thank you for being here and maybe I ask for any questions. I think they're supposed to be open Q&A after this.

Kara: Yeah, absolutely. So, Kara back here as well. So feel free, everyone's been really great and active in the chat. So Amy are you able to configure your screen so you can see the chat?

Professor Ward: Oh, maybe I can stop the screen share.

Kara: Yeah, you can stop screen sharing. And I'm just curious, just knowing and so that everyone's aware, people at Booth across all the MBA programs represent such a wide variety of industries and functions...

Professor Ward: Yeah now I see the pattern, now I see the chat...

Kara: That'll be perfect. So in your classes, professor, do you see like, certain industries or functions represented or is it just students that are interested in everything from consulting to marketing, et cetera? I'm just curious, kind of what the students that choose your classes like, industry-function wise, career-wise, might be interested in.

Professor Ward: So, pretty all over. For obvious reasons, people interested in operations are definitely making up a large chunk. The class is offered, the service operations class is also offered under the entrepreneurship concentration. And so one of the things I've found super interesting is I've had many people in my class that are interested in entrepreneurship and starting their own businesses. And so that's been great for me. I've also seen more people than I would have expected that were interested in kind of venture capital because they wanted to think about, how do I evaluate service businesses? And they felt like taking the class on service operations would sort of help them evaluate when service businesses were performing well versus poorly.

Kara: Great, that's really helpful examples. I appreciate especially the entrepreneurship; it's a very, very popular focus here at Booth. So feel free to pose any questions and Amy, if you see anything you wanna respond to, I know they come in fast, fast and hot in the chat. And if Yueyang, if you notice anything that came up that might be helpful for Professor Ward to dive in on a little bit more. So pause there for a sec. And for anyone, we get this question: So we record these, we post these typically a handful of business days after the events. I see there's a question that just came up from Adithia, do you see that one, Amy?

Professor Ward: No, I'm seeing the chat but somehow maybe I'm a little bit delayed or something.

Kara:It's OK, I can send it to you directly. No problem.

Professor Ward: Oh, the "What sector do you see has the fastest growth in service operations?" You know... That's a really interesting question right now 'cause I think especially after the pandemic, I wanna just say, I don't know. I feel like how the pandemic is affecting service operations is a little bit something we're waiting to see. Certainly you know, if I think about downtowns and I think about service operations and services that supported kind of robust downtowns, that's not happening quite the same way. Will it come back? I don't know. The project we did in the class that, again, was very educational for me, was we had groups of students go out and they had, they compared a business that was pre-COVID and post-COVID. And you needed to do a process analysis, and you needed to look at what had changed in the process pre- and post-COVID. And the range of examples was pretty large. And so I think there were things that you would obviously think about, like a McDonald's or Starbucks or something like that. There was a lot in healthcare; there was also one that I'd never even thought of before that was an investment firm, and it was evaluating lending money. And I guess right now banks are -- so if banks don't make a loan, they have sort of a particular criteria, then those people may go somewhere else to get a loan. And so this was a business that was deciding sort of turned loans from banks, whether or not they would fund money. And they talked about analyzing the pre- and post-COVID operations -- and the main thing that came up was Zoom calls, which of course we're probably all experiencing. And I thought, "How can you evaluate giving money to a business if you can't even go see it?" But they sort of pointed out how much they were able to do in making these lending decisions just by talking to the sort of C-suite people equivalent to small business, over the phone and through Zoom calls. And that in some ways, that was able to actually speed up the process because the scheduling was so much easier. So I guess they ended up doing like initial rounds over Zoom calls, and then they could make initial decisions and determine whether or not it was worthwhile to actually do an onsite visit. And I think, I got the impression that, that ended up being a sort of better process. So that was one of my more surprising pre- and post-COVID projects. I might have gone a little bit off the radar screen in terms of the question but...

Kara: That's great.

Professor Ward: I see one, "What sort of guest speakers?" So I'll speak on that. We brought a guest speaker into class this year following, we did a case on affinity -- it was a lending decision case -- and this was kind of very much, it was a firm that had given their employees more discretion in making loan decisions. So if you look at loan decisions, there's usually like a specific credit that are criteria, and then it's yes or no. And this firm and given employees a little bit more discretion. And so we brought in a guest speaker that is part of a startup firm that is making loan decisions for turned-down loans and using all ML and AI algorithms. And I think one of the interesting things that came out of that was, you sort of have to use the ML/AI algorithms because the rate at which they're needing to make decisions on whether or not to accept or reject the loans is on the order of a second. So think about going to LendingTree and you apply for your loan on LendingTree, and LendingTree goes out and asks somebody, "Do you want the loan?" And if that loan says no, that turned-down loan would potentially pass through the firm we heard from, and that firm would, with their AI systems make a yes or no decision -- and by the time it gets back to the consumer, you don't even know you've been turned down. Maybe you've been turned down two or three times, I don't know. So that was kind of, that guest speaker was brought in so we could understand a little bit about what the current state of the world is.

Kara: There's one here from Richard, "Which element would you say is the most critical in structuring an optimal operations model?" So when I think about a process-analysis diagram, so we did it a little bit with the escalator, which was of course, very simple, right? People go in, they go off the escalator, they go out. But one of the things that I feel like has come out -- or I don't know, that sometimes you can notice -- is that if you just ask what is happening, it's almost the process, the process of writing out the process flow diagram, make sure you understand exactly what's happening in your system. And so I'm actually gonna say, maybe that first step of just making sure you know what's going on is probably the most important. Because a lot of times you talk and it's not totally clear that's been mapped out at a detailed level. And here I can give an example. There was one student in the course that was involved in, I'll say a criminal justice side of things. I can't remember exactly which state but the idea is when prisoners leave prison, there are some support programs that can happen, and hopefully that will help them transition back into society and make them less likely to recidivate. And so I was talking to him a little bit in an office hour, and one of the things that came up was how it's not totally clear that we can draw the process diagram for exactly what happens when somebody gets out of prison. Are they offered treatment? Do they have Medicaid? What kind of integration back into society program can happen? Do we know? So it felt like the first step was actually just to map out what was going on. And it's very, very complicated process; I'm certainly not gonna be able to give you the full spectrum. But that kind of raised my interest as like, "Oh yeah this is, this is pretty complicated. How do I make sure I even know all the parts, all the moving parts?"

Kara: There's one I'll field so you can take a breather for a second and skim through the questions if there's others that stand out. There's a question that Avishak posted about any modifications to the curriculum since the beginning of COVID. And I'm gonna think that might be kinda like the format and modality. So I'll talk a little bit about that. So certainly in the early parts of the pandemic we went completely remote very quickly and every class was taught remote. But we transitioned back to fully in-person for the full-time program at the beginning of the autumn quarter in Autumn 2021. And on the evening, weekend and the part-time side, we are doing now majority back in-person and we're moving toward fully back in-person. But we have kept a few dual modality and virtual options for some of our weekend MBA students who typically would be traveling into Chicago every weekend for classes. But our plan and hope and goal is for Autumn 2022 to be fully back in-person. There are some nuances of course to our Hong Kong and London campuses, so you can always talk to admissions about that specifically -- such as kinda like the format structure. But it's safe to assume an online experience, or excuse me, an in-person experience for your MBA at Booth, which we see a lot of value in; obviously being able to be in class with Amy and have these discussions live makes a big difference. And you alluded to this a little bit, Professor Ward, but have there been cases -- or like, I guess I'm sure the discussions have been different with the topic of COVID over the last two years -- but anything you can think of from like the cases or teaching perspective that's changed since almost exactly two years ago here in the U.S.?

Professor Ward: I found this a super interesting experience because I first thought that this was not a class that could go online: I thought of it as a discussion class. And in particular, sometimes when we did the cases I would think about, if you look at the classroom structure, there's six boards. So I would try to think about like, "OK, this board I'll write on, and this board I'll write on, and then this board I'll write on." And then at the end of class we can look at all the boards and there's some point being made when you look at all the boards together. And so, I would run the discussions using the boards and I thought that was just not gonna work remotely. When we moved online, it kind of forced me to think about doing what we just did today, which was using the iPad to sort of record your comments when we're kind of going through a discussion and trying to get people to argue sort of, here's the yes side, here's the no side. Because I think that's what's really interesting, right? -- is you kind of have your one viewpoint and then it's not about me telling you something, it's about hearing your classmates, and why your classmates are taking a different viewpoint, and that's part of where the learning happens. I think, I felt like using the Notability works pretty well and we've been doing hybrid classes. And so I'll have about half students in the classroom and half students remote. That's this quarter, I just taught the class this quarter. And the way we worked it -- and the reason I didn't use the boards -- was to make sure that everybody saw exactly the same thing. And I feel like that's been going OK. And I also could have the screen set up so the people in the classroom see the people remote, and if you raise a hand in the classroom versus if you raise hand remote, I see everybody. So it felt pretty fine; I was actually pretty happy with it. Yeah, so I don't know -- I think that kind of answered the question.

Kara: Yeah, of course. Dual modality sometimes is hard .

Professor Ward: Yeah, before I would've said absolutely in-person. Now I'm kind of like, you know, I think this is a really good time for education to be experimenting with what types of content should we be delivering remotely and what types of content do we really need to be in-person for? And there is a little bit of an in-person connection, especially when you're doing discussions, that I think is a little bit nicer. But there've also been some technical classes where we were just doing calculations and we did it fully remote, and we did sort of Zoom breakout rooms. And that seemed to work kind of well because then I can go into each of the breakout rooms and if there's problems, like, I can see your screen; I can look at the Excel file or whatever. So I would say I'm still working that out but I think it's actually a really good question to be considering.

Kara: Yeah that's a good point.

Professor Ward: Since I was thinking about logistics here I see there's one question about, "Is the class taught the same way in evening, weekend program?" And the answer is yes. So it's the same class evening, weekend, full-time MBA. For the guest speakers, sometimes, this year my guest speaker was able to attend both the full-time MBA section and the part-time MBA section. Last year, that wasn't the case. And so what I did was I just opened sort of a special a time where everybody could see the guest speaker rather than having different ones.

Kara: Yeah, it's a good question and clarification. So the curriculum and the curricular requirements are identical if you're comparing evening, weekend and full-time. The executive MBA program, while the same faculty teach across programs, it's a more structured curriculum, so it's more of a lockstep program. So again, admissions can answer any questions about that but they all yield the exact same degree; it's all Booth MBA no matter which program you go through. But the format, it's more just about the, you know, our evening, weekend and executive students are working while they're going to school. Full-time students do relocate to Chicago and go to school full-time, so that part of it's different, but the learning objectives and learning outcomes are really gonna be the same across programs -- it's the lifestyle that differs a little bit. There's a question here, just to go back to the COVID and very topical about hospitals, if you've come across that one from Ravish: "During COVID, hospitals were crowded with patients. How can service operations be used for maximum patient-physician interactions, like analysis, identifying and really streamlining healthcare operations?" Any thoughts on that?

Professor Ward: Yeah, I think one theme going through a lot of the healthcare operations -- and we do talk about several healthcare operations -- is how much can you kind of personalize the treatment versus what does that mean in terms of the resources you acquire? And I would say the more you personalize the treatment, of course, that is great for the patient. But it also makes it harder and more complex from an operational standpoint. And so I would say there's a little bit of this tension between sort of personalizing the treatment and having kind of a pool of physicians that can see quite a few people and handle, have the flexibility to handle different cases. So that is kind of a common theme that comes up. In terms of the COVID, I mean we certainly -- and some of the projects I mentioned to you were about like, for example, a COVID testing station. How many people can we serve at a COVID testing station? How far apart do the people need to be? And if they need to be this far apart and we reduce our capacity by this much, what does that mean in terms of the lowered throughput of patients that we can serve, or the increased wait times that might happen? Because when you require patients to sort of stand farther apart and you're reducing the capacity, I mean there's no way your wait times are gonna increase. One of the interesting, I'll call one of the student groups for our student COVID projects that came out on the healthcare setting, was there was a pediatric service. And because of COVID, they had moved some of their operations where basically in the parking lot you could, you know, the physician would come out to you in your car and maybe I think check that before you kind of went into the clinic, checked that you didn't have COVID and maybe give you an initial screening. And that meant that the physicians were walking quite a bit back and forth between the clinic and the parking lot. And so even though it seems like a small thing, it meant that their capacity to see patients was lowered because they had this extra "walking time" managed into their day. So there is I thought kind of a small example of how COVID kind of decreased capacity in a little bit of a sneaky way. I'm not sure if that fully answered the question but maybe it was a little bit around the space of healthcare and operations and COVID.

Kara: Yeah absolutely, that's a good question. And there's questions, there's some in the Q&A as well, so I'm looking at that now. so Evans asked about a different industry: "Have you done some research on enhancing fintech company service delivery and financial inclusion of non-banked populations in developing economies?"

Professor Ward: No, that's a great question. I haven't done very much in fintech at all. Basically the only thing I've done in fintech is the project I alluded to with Yueyang. And it was for a market-making firm and the market-making firm is trying to decide how much of the buy-side to hold, and how much of the sell-side to hold. And we basically had access to the limit order books, and we kind of developed algorithms to look at when they should place buy orders and when they should place sell orders. And it was on a particular -- not a stock but a particular index.

Kara: Think there's maybe just one more I see, then we can wrap up a couple minutes before 1:30. This was asked around one o'clock, so I think right when we started Q&A: "How would you describe elevator services? I have seen A-B-C designations for floor-stop traffic. What type of thought process did this involve?" That's in the Q&A.

Professor Ward: I haven't personally worked specifically on elevators. But I have seen a couple pretty interesting design papers. And the question is kind of, if you're at your floor, you wanna minimize the wait time for the elevator, right? And so when elevators aren't moving, there's a question of where should they rest? And so the algorithm for your elevator is, you wanna think about where people are most likely to call the elevator -- and given that, where should the elevator rest? Because if the elevator rests at the top floor but people are calling it from the bottom floor, you don't want that. And OK, probably they're most likely to call it from the bottom floor. But if you rest all the elevators at the bottom floor, that's gonna be a bit of a pain for people at the top floor and the middle floor. So that type of algorithm, I've seen some papers that are kind of looking at optimization and reinforcement learning problems to figure out where should the elevators rest. And I'll say one more thing on that. So the Google elevators -- I don't know if anybody's looked at some of these Google offices -- but at least the one in Chicago the elevator, if you press the button, it has a little calculation that it does in the background to figure out: OK is the elevator going to the second floor and then the first floor? And so you're told what elevator you're gonna get on.

Kara: Ah, that's right.

Professor Ward: It's not like you just wait until one opens. So I was like, "Oh, look at all these elevator problems."

Kara: I think I've seen something similar in some more newer hotels as well, and they're larger and larger .

 Professor Ward: Yeah, they're trying to do something smarter. I thought that was kind of cool.

Kara: Absolutely. Yeah, that's interesting. There's one quick one I'll answer, then I'll pose one final question to you, professor. There was a question about taking classes, like, could someone take this class with like, the executive students? So I'll break that apart a little bit. It is quite easy to take classes across the evening, weekend and full-time MBA classes because they are the same lecture throughout the week. Of course you wanna make sure it's okay with the faculty, but you always have priority registration over what we call your home population. So if you're an evening student, that means Monday through Friday evening courses. But after a few rounds of registration, it becomes like a free-for-all basically. So you can try to register for a full-time daytime class if you've got that availability, or if you're a full-time student and don't really wanna do the 8:30 a.m. class and prefer a 6 p.m., it's usually pretty easy to do. So again you have priority over your home population. The executive program does not allow that because as I mentioned before, it's a much more structured program and much more predetermined for you, so that there isn't that sort of taking class, excuse me, taking classes across on different programs' flexibility. But the executive program does have an electives week during the summer where you can take kinda like half-courses for a lot of different variety of like, more concentration-type topics. So different ways you can approach and of course, email admissions directly if you wanna unpack that a little bit with your specific questions. And the last question I'll ask you, Amy -- and of course feel free to respond to anything else you might have seen -- but when you were talking about your background and said that you love working at Booth, you kind of lit up. So I'm curious, what is it about it? Is it your colleagues, your research? Kind of, what is it about it that makes you enjoy your time at Booth so far? That would be great to hear.

Professor Ward: The intellectual environment. I would say at Booth and across the entire university, I have just loved the fact that -- and I mean, of course all universities have this to some degree -- I feel like Booth has it to the nth degree, which is people just appreciate thinking and I've super enjoyed that. And the MBA students are really fantastic. So interacting with the MBA students, hearing about all the experiences and all the interesting things you guys are doing, that is also definitely part of it.

Kara: Great, we appreciate that. Well, we can wrap up now. I wanna thank you of course, all of you attendees. There was such great dialogue and discussion in the chat throughout, we really appreciate that interaction and hopefully it gives you a sense of what it would be like to be in the classroom -- whether, it's you know, hybrid level or in-person. And a huge thank you to Yueyang for helping out and answering questions; and of course, Professor Ward. We can't thank you enough for your time, we know you have a lot going on as we wrap up our quarter here, our winter quarter here in Chicago. So thanks to everybody for joining. We'll get this recording posted. And of course, any admissions questions any of you have, whether you're admitted, applying in the next year or two, reach out to us, never hesitate. We're really here to help you and you can always reach out to me directly, and I can get you to the right person if I'm not the appropriate admissions contact for you. So thanks again to everybody and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day or evening, depending on where you are in the world.