Our Guest Post today comes from Nancy Southin at Thompson Rivers University, Brent Snider at University of Calgary, and Rosanna Cole at Surrey Business School.
Employers are increasingly demanding that business schools provide not only content knowledge to our students, but also facilitate improved skill development in areas such a resiliency, critical thinking, communication, and tolerance for ambiguity. While this may seem daunting as we plan our upcoming curriculums, it could be as easy as PIE. Partial Information Exercise (PIE) is an approach we have developed where select information is intentionally withheld from a classroom exercise or case. Students must identify what information is missing, seek it from the instructor, then integrate that new information.
Our Patio Swings Intermodal Shipping Competition is a 30-minute classroom exercise that challenges student teams to identify the all the necessary supply chain activities required to effectively ship patio swings from a foreign supplier all the way to a national retail chain’s stores in time for a spring sale. Students must determine what date the order must be placed, how many intermodal containers will be needed, what date those containers need to arrive at the supplier for loading, and how many additional part-time staff are needed to process the shipment through the retailer’s distribution center. Students learn about global supply chain activities while also developing the desired workplace skills since only half the information required is initially provided. This exercise has proven to increase student interest in global supply chain management jobs, get them thinking more critically than traditional cases, and create a highly engaged classroom environment. To date, it has been successfully conducted in both undergraduate and graduate supply chain classes, and in multiple countries.
If you are looking for a global supply chain classroom activity that combines content knowledge and skill development for students in an engaging 30 minute exercise, just contact us at nsouthin@tru.ca or brent.snider@haskayne.ucalgary.ca and we will send you the complete lesson plan – it’s as easy as PIE!
Thanks for this wonderful post and your willingness to share your ideas with our blog followers. I know you have received dozens of requests already. Brent Snider has posted two other class exercises –Beat the Instructor and Campus Club Cupcakes. To see them, just type his name into the Blog Search Engine box on the right.