index.Rmd

--- 
title: "Decision Modeling with Spreadsheets"
author: "William G. Foote"
date: "2021-05-08 to `r Sys.Date()`"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
documentclass: book
bibliography: [book.bib, packages.bib]
biblio-style: apalike
link-citations: yes
description: "This is a spreadsheet version of every management science book out there, less all of the detail."
---

# Prolegomena {-}

The material in this book arises from several years of quantitative consulting for management and executive decision makers across several industries including government entities. Chapters and the flow of models derives from teaching MBA courses at Manhattan College which form the content for an eponymous focused one term, 3-credit graduate core course. As the title indicates the primary goal is to model decisions organizations and their decision makers face. The modeling approach is decidedly quantitative. The decisions include hiring and laying off, making and buying, marketing, financing, procuring, distributing, developing, and strategizing what and when to produce and serve to customers, employees, investors, vendors, and, yes, regulators.

The primary computer software platform is the Microsoft Excel 2019 spreadsheet environment with the Solver add-in. The course platform consists of companion workbooks. I do not recommend the use of Google Spreadsheets, yet. They often do not support some of the more basic structures of Excel, including the charting object (plots), the pivot table object, and macro recording. There is the smallest amount of programming in Visual Basic for Applications to automate the heavier computational loads of simulation. The goal, computationally, has been to use whereever possible what is native to the spreadsheet environment without use the of external calls to vast computational environments where algorithms alas are behind the proverbial curtain.

Here is a sample weekly schedule for a 7 week course.

![](images/01/weekly-schedule.jpg)

The book may be used to supplement much larger tomes devoted to the entire span of management science and computing techniques. The approach taken in this book is to titrate, curate, and focus students and practitioners on the essentials of using spreadsheets carefully in developing rapid prototype models of decisions in the field. The panoply of models that could have made the cut, but did not, underscores the need for a principled focus on essential model building and implementation in a spreadsheet. 

With the essentials in hand, and in practice, analysts will have a solid basis to build prototypical models that can be expanded horizontally across other model configurations and vertically through various decision making requirements. As such, for example, network models are not discussed but are used to present the basics of a planning model. Also the range of Monte Carlo simulation is barely touched, but its utility is exploited with an uncommonly found model of a thick tail event distribution.