Simulation Manuals and Computer Programs

AIRLINE

A Strategic Management Simulation

4th Edition

INSTRUCTOR'S MANUAL

Revised September 2001

Simulation Manuals and Computer Programs

Written by

Jerald R. Smith

and

Peggy A. Golden

2002 Prentice-Hall, Inc.

CONTENTS

Contacting the authors...... iv

Changes in the Fourth Edition...... iv

Administering the Simulation B an Overview...... v

Section 1

Installing the Software and Running the Programs

Computer Requirements...... 1

Installing the Software...... 1

Running the Program on Your Computer...... 3

Printer Details...... 5

Error Messages...... 6

Establish Correct Setting for Attachments...... 6

Using Yahoo Mail Program...... 6

Section 2

Classroom Topics

General Description of the Simulation...... 7

Time Requirements...... 8

A Typical Syllabus...... 8

Debriefing Student Teams...... 9

Analysis Forms and Log Books...... 9

Peer Evaluation...... 9

Grading...... 10

Weekly Analysis...... 10

The Mid-Continent Airline Case...... 10

Size and Makeup of Student Teams...... 11

Special Classroom Activities...... 11

An Exercise in Structure and Strategy...... 12

Stock Price and Performance Points...... 12

Counseling and Advising Teams...... 13

Section 3

Simulation Topics

Demand Algorithm...... 14

Calculating the Breakeven Load Factor...... 15

Bypassing a Team If They Do Not Submit Decisions...15

Parameter Changes...... 16

Administrator’s Report...... 19

Instructor Prints Quarterly Financial Report...... 20

Students Print Quarterly Financial Report...... 20

News Messages to Students...... 20

Incidents...... 20

Changing Parameters...... 22

Typical Questions from Students...... 24

Examples of Takeovers and Mergers...... 28

Airline Fourth Edition Instructions for Students……….31

Other Simulations by the Authors

Published by: Prentice Hall

Corporation: A Global Business Simulation

4th Edition

Collective Bargaining Simulated

4th Edition

Human Resource Management Simulation

CONTACTING THE AUTHORS

If you have any questions or problems, please call, fax, or email. If we are not at school, leave both your office and home numbers. We can avoid playing telephone tag if you can call us at home at 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 p.m. EST or EDT. If you have to leave a message, always mention that the call is in reference to the Airline simulationwe always return simulation users' calls first. Please give your office hours. Give us your fax number if you have one. If you are on email, we can usually contact you even faster. Thanks for your interest and text adoption!

Jerald Smith 9544625220Peggy Golden 9547625220

Email: mail:

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH EDITION

Note: The student manual must be purchased in order to obtain the site access instructions and registration code. This will allow students to download the student programs.

1.A MAJOR CHANGE: The simulation does not need to be initialized, nor do the student disks need to be initialized. This also eliminates the need to RESTORE a team’s disk if it becomes unusable. The consequence is that each team must know the number of teams playing the simulation, the incident order and the Industry (A - Z) before they can enter decisions.

2. Aircraft choices and costs have been updated to the new third generation aircraft including two types of regional jets.

3. Maintenance choice sequence has been changed from 0, 1, 2 to 1, 2, 3 in order to dispel the negative connotation of a zero maintenance level.

4. The three price levels have been shifted somewhat.

5. Cabin service costs have been adjusted to reflect current food costs.

6. Markets served for odd numbered firms has been simplified and a one-stop route has been added. In addition, a route that does not include a hub has been added.

7. An item that needed changing, the cost of fuel, was not made as the entire algorithm would need to be rewritten. This is a job we did not want to tackle this edition. The important fact to get across to students is that fuel prices do fluctuate and are not simply a given.

8.The buy- versus lease-costs have been changed so that it is slightly more efficient to buy the aircraft. In the past students have been averse to assuming loans; This should make the playing field more level.

ADMINISTERING THE SIMULATION B An Overview

(More detailed coverage of the following information is later in this manual)

The steps below should give you a general idea how the administration is executed.

1. Both students and instructor should read Pages 139 in the student manual.

2.Establish teams (up to 12) of from one to six students. We strongly recommend teams of three to four if possible. Teams will select a name for their airline and make a set of decisions for the first quarter (quarter one).

3. The instructor must decide whether students are going to submit decisions on their own (team) disk, or submit the decisions on a (paper) decision form. In this case, the instructor will be entering the decisions on the computer. If you have teams enter decisions on their own disk, ALWAYS use a virus checker on each student disk as you put it into your floppy disk drive. If the students are entering decisions on their own disk, the instructor should prepare the required disks and/or the computer's hard drive, following instructions in this manual.

If students are entering decisions on a disk, they must be informed of the TOTAL NUMBER OF TEAMS PLAYING the simulation before they begin. The decision entry program will not let them proceed without this information.

You will also need to establish the name of the industry (A, B, C, D, etc.) and assign a team number to each team.

4.Merge the decisions for quarter one. During this process you will be asked for the number of teams playing. Then you will compute the results. This will take from five to 20 minutes, depending on how many teams you have and whether you are entering the decisions or whether you are using student disks.

5. Print the administrator's report for yourself. We like to print it before printing the student reports as there may be some information on the administrator's report that may be passed on to the student teams via the instructor's news message (which is printed on each team's report).

6 There are two methods of printing the student reports. If the teams are entering their own decisions, they will also have a program that allows them to print the quarterly report. You may print the student reports for them. You may also want to print page one of the report for yourself. This will take from five to 30 minutes depending on your choice of printing options and printer speed.

7. The whole process repeats, beginning with a new set of decisions. In most classroom situations, decisions are made once a week.

8. Please help us to keep you informed of any changes by visiting the Airline home page 2-3 times during the semester. The location is:

You may be advised to download a more current copy of the software from the publisher's internet site.

Computer-Related Problems

We would like to ask a favor. If you are having any kind of computer problem, please try to get someone around your school to look at the problem first. Many cases of that #$%#$@*&#$% simulation is a result of a program not being copied onto a disk, a disk drive door was left open, or (often) the wrong file location was entered into the program (e.g., Entering A: as the location when the files were in C:\AirlineHistory). If you've never worked with a computer, it would be very helpful to get someone more experienced to show you how to install the program and make copies of student disks. We encourage you to become familiar with running the simulation before turning it over to a student or an assistant to run--you'll feel much more in control of the situation. This is very important to new users. More on this on page 5.

IMPORTANT NOTICE- USED BOOKS

The used book market has become very efficient. In fact, too efficient, because used simulation manuals, most with pages missing, are being shipped from one part of the country to another. We have seen some used simulation manuals missing as much as 40% of the book--with no forms whatsoever.

In addition, the previous user has often written their team's decisions in the manual, giving the purchaser an unfair advantage.

Please put on your book order form that you want new books. You will be doing your students, and us, a favor.

Thanks from the authors!

BECOME FAMOUS! ADD YOUR NAME!

Note: We want to add the names of the professors who adopt AIRLINE to the acknowledgments page of the student manual. However, we don’t know who you are! If you will drop us an Email note, we will place your name in it the next time we print a new run of student manuals. Thanks!

CORRECTIONS TO FIRST PRINTING OF THE STUDENT MANUAL

Instructor: Please copy and distribute to your students. If the student manual version is greater than 1, these do not apply as they will have been incorporated into the new printing. It is the first printing if the list of numbers in the lower left corner of the back of the cover page is 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

Note: The student manual must be purchased in order to obtain the site access instructions and registration code. This will allow students to download the student programs.

Page 4: Advertising and an on-board magazine (Substitute this more complete example):

To indicate you want to produce an on-board magazine, enter a 1 as the right-hand digit in your advertising budget EACH quarter plus the total cost of the magazine plus your normal advertising budget (example: $2,500 advertising + [10 A/C  $500 each] = $7501).

Page 10: Long term Loans

Add the following note: The decision entry program will not prevent you from entering an amount greater than the maximum allowed. It is your responsibility to stay with in your bank’s policy regarding the maximum amount of a long term loan.

Page 13: Table 4: Aircraft Specification Data

Change cost from Amonthly” lease cost to quarterly lease cost.

Page 14: Fourth item in Market Research Studies

to “The estimate of total seats sold daily in each market (not the seats sold for each airline)”

Page 17: Number of Markets: Table 6

The total number of markets if 7 teams are playing is 35 not 29

Page 26 and 28: Depreciation

Calculated at .0175% of the cost of an aircraft and not 2%.

CRITICAL NOTE IF SENDING AND RECEIVING DATA BY EMAIL:

You will need to set the options on your Email program, e.g., Outlook Express so attachments do not open in the BODY of the message. When your instructor sends you the history so that you can print your report, it will come as an attachment to a message. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN THIS ATTACHMENT as it is simply a file with data in it and is NOT a selfexecuting program, (thus the name, DATA1.A3 or whatever). COPY THIS FILE to either your A: drive or to C:/Airline if you are storing data on your hard drive. Then use the Student simulation program to open the file and print it.

USING YAHOO AS THE EMAIL PROGRAM

If a team is using YAHOO for email, they must ascertain the program option is set so “INLINE TEXT” is not selected. They should go to “Check Messages,” then select the message from the instructor, and on the top line of tabs, select the (center) box that will have two options, “Inline Text” (which unfortunately is the default) and “Attachment.” Select the latter.

SECTION 1

INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE AND RUNNING THE PROGRAMS

COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS

AIRLINE requires an IBM-PC (or compatible) with one floppy disk drive and a hard (fixed) disk; either system needs 256K memory. The program requires Windows 95 or higher. It will not operate with Windows 3.1. A printer is also necessary. Complete instructions for installing the simulation are given below.

You will obtain the program files from the publisher. Contact your Prentice Hall representative for information on obtaining a password to access the download program on the web. The files will include files to install the program and a program which are the operating programs which you run in order to access the menu and run the program.

Make certain you place an extra copy of the Airline programs around your office or home. If your C Drive crashes, you will not be out of business!

Creating Directories for the Programs

Create the following directories:

C:\Airline This is where all the programs and files are installed.

C:\AirlineHistory This is for the administrator’s history and it is set up in the program to recognize this directory.

C:\AirlineStudentHistoryThis is for the team’s decision files and data Files. It is set up in the program to recognize this directory.

To Recap:You can use the AirlineHistory directory for your history files and the AirlineStudentHistory for the student decision files.

If you enter decisions, you should use the AirlineStudentHistory directory for the student decisions. Or, you may use a floppy disk in the A: drive for student history, whichever you choose. If you are receiving decisions from students via email, you will want to use the C:\AirlineStudentHistory directory for accumulating those files, as it will be easier. If you want to transport the files to another location for processing or printing, then use a floppy for student history.

INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE

1. There are three files that are used to install the instructor's programs: Airline.CAB, setup.exe, and setup.lst. We will assume you have saved the program files from the publisher in a temporary directory.

Go to that directory via Windows Explorer and go to START, then RUN, then type setup.exe.

During the installation process you will be given a chance to rename the location where the program is going to install the software. We strongly suggest you rename this location, as the typical installation program will bury the programs three-layers deep and it will be very hard to find them later unless you make the changes shown below. On the screen that is titled (see below for a mock-up of the screen):

______

AIRLINE Setup

______

Image

of a

Computer