Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida.
This post is a followup on my prior Guest Post (April 15, 2019). Today, I would like to share my students’ perspective on the forecasting simulation in MyOMlab. It deals with the retail industry as operations consultant. The students enjoyed this because of their own experiences in retail and as customers.
I teach this class online and having further online resources in MyOMlab to enable student learning is great! Sure, I have hundreds of pencasts and tutorials on doing the analytics, but the simulations are a practical approach to learning the lessons. Do you remember using a graphing calculator? I don’t, so was surprised to have 40% of the students talking about that old forecasting method! They also commented on how they learned to use ExcelOM and found it more accurate and faster with less steps.
Not only does the simulation provide students with further insight on applying the lesson and using technology for analytics, but also the events that happen during the simulation are realistic. Many of my students commented on connecting this simulation to the real world was quite enlightening to consider how the events may affect supply and demand–such as how external conditions can affect market prices.
They also got quite excited when they saw their accuracy improve, even to 0% error. If you can keep the MAPE relatively low, you even get a $10,000 bonus in the simulation. 60% of the students commented on how this imaginary bonus helped to motivate them and keep them focused on achieving the 10% MAPE goal. I guess even in a simulation incentives are motivating!
Students enjoyed how the simulation made learning fun. Several students commented how they want to plan more time to do it again to further improve. One student reflected on a on a key lesson he learned regarding wasting time with non-algorithmic solutions. The simulation showed him to have more faith in his spreadsheet modeling skills.