Experiences with the use of supply chain management software in education

Production and Operations Management, Spring 2000 by Campbell, Ann, Goentzel, Jarrod, Savelsbergh, Martin

EXPERIENCES WITH THE USE OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE IN EDUCATION*

This paper discusses four experiments and experiences with the use of supply chain management software, in this case the CAPS Logistics software, at different levels of undergraduate and graduate education at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We hope that the readers will get an idea of the commitment and resources necessary to integrate supply chain software into the classroom as well as the potential rewards.

(LOGISTICS GAMES, SUPPLY CHAIN SOFTWARE, LOGISTICS EDUCATION)

1. Introduction

In the past decade, society has witnessed unprecedented changes in the availability and use of information technology. The use of e-mail and the Internet has become common place in industry as well as in many households. There has also been an increase in the availability of sophisticated planning tools, especially in the area of supply chain management, with vendors such as i2 Technologies, Manugistics, CAPS Logistics, and Numetrix.

Such changes should affect curricula at all educational levels in order to prepare students for the high tech world in which they will be living. Many people believe, for example, that it is essential that elementary school students are exposed to the Internet. Likewise, we feel, that it is necessary to expose undergraduate and graduate students in industrial engineering, management science, operations management, and operations research to sophisticated planning tools, such as supply chain management software.

This paper discusses four experiments and experiences with the use of supply chain management software, in this case the CAPS Logistics software, at different levels of undergraduate and graduate education at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. We hope that the readers will get an idea of the commitment and resources necessary to integrate supply chain software into the classroom as well as the potential rewards. Our choice to use the CAPS Logistics software was one of convenience; it was available. However, there is no reason to believe that the experiments we discuss cannot be replicated with other supply chain management software.

In each of the experiments, students learn supply chain concepts in an environment that resembles one that they may encounter when they finish their education and go on into industry. The use of supply chain management software makes teaching supply chain management more flexible and more extensive and provides students with more elaborate problem situations that better represent reality. Most supply chain software has welldeveloped graphical interfaces to represent the elements of the supply chain being studied. Visual representations help students connect better with the data and the solution methods.

We discuss the use of supply chain software in the form of an inventory routing game, as part of a case study and a design project, and as the basis for a software development class. Each of these situations represents a different level of interaction with the software. The inventory routing game can be used in a single lab session and does not require any previous exposure to supply chain management software. In a case study or a design project, where supply chain concepts are learned through model development, the use of supply chain management software is more involved and requires either previous experience or some form of basic training. Software development requires a much greater time commitment and has to be the focus of an entire class. In this case, students have to be or have to become intimately familiar with the supply chain management software and its capabilities.

The various situations also offer a continuum of interaction with reality. A game is internal to the class, removed from the source of data. A case study represents a company setting, perhaps incorporating some prepared data. In a design project, students work directly with company representatives and the data gathering process. In software development, students must draw from many experiences to anticipate operational reality.

The structure of the remainder of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, we briefly introduce the CAPS Logistics supply chain software. Section 3 describes our experiences with the use of a logistics game for vendor-managed inventory resupply. A supply chain design case study is presented in Section 4. The design project in Section 5 considers standard vehicle routing. Section 6 traces the software development of the inventory routing game used in Section 3. Finally, in Section 7, we summarize the advantages and disadvantages of using sophisticated planning tools in education based on our experiences. In order to facilitate replicating some of the experiments described in this paper, we provide more detailed information on each of them either in Appendices A-D or on The Logistics Institute web page at www.tli.gatech.edu.