The Operator

• Find the bottleneck and spend there: capacity added at any other step buys nothing (Goldratt, The Goal).
• Use Little's Law to read lead time and backlog, and see why a step run near 100% busy swings far harder after a shock than one at 80%.
• Weigh prevention against absorbing a quality problem when the cost of failure arrives days later (cost of quality).
• Manage cash as something the operation earns: revenue follows what is delivered, and running out forces cuts.
• Write decisively under time pressure, and build a team rhythm for continuous, interrupt-driven work.

1. 1
   Inbox arrival

   On every active day the line runs the day and fresh emails land, the same ones for every team, each tagged urgent, important or info.
2. 2
   Read the board

   The operations board shows each step's capacity, work and queue, today's bottleneck, lead time against the promise, output, quality, revenue and cash.
3. 3
   Triage

   Skim the inbox. Urgent emails close sooner and count more, so they go first. An email still open when the next day starts can let its problem land on the line.
4. 4
   Choose or write

   Choice emails give three or four options; their effects stay hidden until you answer, and the order is shuffled for each team. Written emails ask for a short real response (100-250 words).
5. 5
   See the grade, then the line

   Each answer is graded against the options available, on the pillars it touches; its effect on the line starts the next operating day. A missed email counts as zero.
6. 6
   Weekly review

   Every five operating days: output, lead time, backlog, the bottleneck, quality, money and the team's own inbox numbers, with a line on what moved each. Each student then writes a short reflection from their role: what the bottleneck was and what they did about it.

The leaderboard, scorecard, final report and gradebook all rank on the Operator Score = 60% Call Quality + 40% Operating Results. Call Quality is the four pillars below (about 29/29/21/21): each answer is graded against the options the team had, a written reply counts its 0-10 grade × 10 on its topic's pillar, an email left to expire counts as 0, an urgent email answered within 12 hours of landing (by about noon) adds a small extra grade of 100, and each pillar is the severity-weighted average of its grades (urgent 1.5×, info 0.5×). Operating Results is how the operating line ran, season to date: 50% on time against the company's promise, 30% throughput (delivered ÷ what customers asked for), 20% cash health (cash against three months of costs). A student's suggested grade is 70% the team's Operator Score + 30% their own work (25 points memo quality: their average memo grade, counted at n/(n+5) for n graded and the team's memo average for the rest; 5 points answering their share of the team's emails on time); once any team in the class claims a role, that is 80% of the grade and role credit the other 20% (half answering emails the student's role owns each week, half weekly reflections of 40+ words).

• An operating line under the inbox

  Each company runs three steps that move the one thing it sells, with daily capacities, queues that carry over, lead time against a promise, defects that come back as rework, and revenue and cash that follow output. The operations board names each day's bottleneck.

• Emails that act on the line

  All but one of each day's emails (two of three on a standard day) are calls that act on the line: each option changes capacity, demand, backlog, quality, prices or costs, and an unanswered problem lands the next morning. Some emails also carry news that hits the line the next day, whatever the team decides. Some calls schedule a follow-up email days later.

• Weekly operations review

  Every five operating days: output, lead time, backlog, the bottleneck, the quality rate and money, plus the team's own inbox numbers (Little's Law on its own work), with a line explaining each big mover.

• Same email, same day; shock day

  Every team in the class gets the same emails on the same day (options shuffled per team), so the debrief can compare calls on the same problem. The professor can send one scripted shock to every team at once and compare the recoveries, and the Operations arc shows each team's line over time.

• LLM response grader

  Written-response emails (100-250 words) are graded 0-10 by Claude on decisiveness, reasoning quality, and operational realism, with a one-line comment. The grade × 10 counts on the pillar the email's topic belongs to, and a memo's plan, where it has one, acts on the line in proportion to its grade.

• Flexible cadence, 7 companies

  Professor picks active days (Mon-Fri / every day / custom pattern), emails per day (1-5), response window (2-168 hrs), and total sim length (5-112 active days). Seven companies (SaaS, DTC, consumer app, agency, restaurants, a contract manufacturer and a 3PL fulfillment warehouse), each with its own line and its own emails on top of a shared pool.

• Light roles tied to the line

  Four hats: Operations Lead (the bottleneck step, operations and finance emails), Service Lead (the last step, customer and strategy emails), Supply & Quality Lead (the first step, the defect rate, external emails) and People Lead (employee emails). The inbox marks each email "For:" its owners, each student writes a short weekly reflection on the bottleneck, and the professor reads them all on one page.