The Effect of Learning Curve on Production Operations Professor
Suresh Chand, with the assistance of PhD student Sunantha
Teyarachakul, is seeking to understand the effect of learning
and forgetting on batch sizing decisions in a production
environment. Batch size is how many units of products should be
produced for inventory analysis. Learning occurs where time to
perform a task goes down with repetition. Forgetting occurs
where time to perform a task goes up due to time elapsed since
the last completion of the task. The duo’s research draws
insights from industry professionals who face batching decisions
in their everyday work experiences. It is up to a firm to
determine the production schedule to meet demand. If batch sizes
are large and batches are produced infrequently, there is a
large amount of learning within the batch, which is positive,
but also a large amount of forgetting between two successive
batches, which is negative. One practitioner noted, “We produce
in large batches because our setup times