Tag: MyOMLab simulations

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the Supply Chain Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

Here is my review of the 5th and the last of the Heizer/Render/Munson MyOMLab simulations, Supply Chain Management (SCM).  These 3 words are often misunderstood and a passionate topic for me! This simulation puts the student in the role of the supply chain analyst thinking about order and inventory needs, offering a hands-on and visual learning opportunity. SCM is an area that few of my students have experienced, other than as a customer.  Thinking about the details that enable fulfillment of their own orders is rather eye opening.

As in real businesses, SCM decisions shape competitive abilities in a challenging manner. My students have really enjoyed practicing this simulation.  One student reflected that she valued the learning– and even felt stress as days ticked by and shipments were delayed! Some students found this simulation challenging and needed to carefully read Chapter 11 in the textbook. Most said the simulation was a great way to understand how SCM works.

This simulation is relatively fast, requiring students to pay attention to their budget, as well as customer morale.  Selecting and monitoring suppliers, responding to messages and delays, evaluating fees, etc. while meeting contract requirements on-time requires foresight.  Also, evaluating multiple suppliers with different contracts to mitigate risks means paying attention to stay with the budget. (What a timely topic given the volatility of Chinese supply chains during the caronavirus). Students quickly learn that going cheap is not always the way to go!  Also, having a plan for the consistent arrival of inventory to manage demand was less predictable than they anticipated. Key concepts for real businesses too!

Through the simulation, students can better learn SCM and see opportunities to improve performance.  Students often found themselves reacting to unexpected situations when they did not have a clear plan to balance ordering enough inventory without going over budget while fulfilling customer orders.

 

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the MyOMLab Quality Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

As shared in prior guest posts, the Heizer/Render/Munson MyOMLab simulations offer a realistic scenario to help students further evaluate their OM lessons. The Quality Management simulation uses the hospitality industry, in which students role play a restaurant manager. This simulation helps students see the details that go into improving quality for an organization to be more successful. Almost 60% of my students found this relatable to their work experiences.

This simulation challenges students to use the quality management principles from the textbook. Students need to think logically about the evidence they are given to make decisions about various investments to improve customer service and reduce failure rates. Visualizing the options to prioritize further actions needed gives students some insight on what a manager must deal with, especially when pressured to turn around a restaurant. The various problems students are given really does draws them into the scenario!

Students reflected on options that supported immediate operating needs, as well as options that may be nice to consider, but did not necessarily address complaints or fix major issues. One student came up with several ideas, not even built in the simulation, that were great examples of critically thinking about the lessons to extend additional realistic options.

Students need to sift through the feedback they are given to identify relevant customer and staff issues to support their financial and customer service goals. The majority of the students felt the simulation was fun as it gave them a sense of accomplishment and pride to positively influence profits and customer reviews over the simulated one-year time period. Some students further commented how the simulation was driving them to even improve quality at their work!

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the MyOMLab Project Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

This post will focus on the Project Management simulation which uses a construction industry scenario. (My post last month looked at the forecasting simulation).The majority of students felt this simulation reflected how things likely worked for a project manager, even finding the pressure to perform engaging and realistic.

Students get immersed in planning needs and quickly learn decisions cannot be focused on profit entirely to achieve customer expectations. Making decisions and seeing the consequences of those decisions was viewed a valuable learning experience. The process of evaluating feedback is practical and several students reflected the need to better plan their life similarly!

Students often see many job opportunities in project management. This simulation gives them an appreciation for what they do, as well as how unforeseen circumstances beyond their ability to control are likely necessitating attention back to their critical path. One student even commented that he now understands his own need to be more flexible adjusting plans at home.

In this simulation, half of the students said they completed the simulation more than once as they felt motivated to better master the lesson. Students often mentioned their ‘light bulb’ moment was when they discovered they did not plan enough slack early in the project. Learning that trying to offset plans around natural disasters and other issues was much harder to fix later in the project.

About 30% of the students mentioned using Excel to plan and track progress. They found the simulation a great extension, building upon what they learned in the study plans and other MyOMLab assignments. While many found this virtual simulation challenging, the majority of the students felt enlightened and appreciated the opportunity to test their project management skills.

Guest Post: Student Perspective on the MyOMLab Forecasting Simulation

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.

Guest Post: Have You Assigned Students the MyOMLab Simulations?

Our Guest Post comes from Wende Huehn-Brown, who is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida.

Previous posts on this blog site have focused on use of Heizer/Render/Munson’s five MyOMLab simulations in physical classroom situations. I am constantly trying to adapt what I do in my face-to-face classes for my entirely online students. This semester I piloted using these simulations for an alternative submission– 50% of the students chose to complete them.

My first concern: Will my students have the same ‘get it’ perspective Dr. Amy Peterson shared in her post on this blog? Some of my online students get overwhelmed with Pearson MyLabs, while other students enjoy the flexible learning environment as they juggle school around the rest of their busy lives. But if new technology is confusing or unreliable it can be a road block to their success. So I waited to adopt the simulations until I could see how they perform.

In our online classes we have built a set of pencasts and tutorials for each week’s lesson to substitute for physical classroom learning opportunities. (See my prior Guest Post.) We continue to grow various learning resources and hold our student success rates steady. Initially, there was apprehension to adopt these simulations over fears of increasing the workload on our students.

Student feedback said the simulations were the most exciting part of the class! They perceived them practical as they could relate to the scenarios and felt the knowledge and skill was applicable in the real-world and to help them grow their careers. Several participants suggested this alternative should become a required assignment as it pushed them to a higher level of critical thinking. I will provide specific feedback on each of the five simulations in the coming months!

Guest Post: Teaching OM to 2,500 Students a Year at UCF

Dr. Andy Johnson is a Lecturer in Supply Chain Management at the University of Central Florida, the largest single campus college in the U.S. with over 66,000 students. He holds a PhD from the Rutgers Business School.

The University of Central Florida’s (UCF) College of Business Administration has undergone a dramatic change in teaching it’s 13 core and non-core courses to over 8,500 students each semester. In the Fall of 2017, the college developed a unique way of engaging a large student body using a variant of the mixed-mode method called “Reduced Seat Time, Active Learning”. This is a blended method combining face-to-face and online requirements. The intent of the five face-to-face sessions is to provide a group type activity verifying learning for a particular course subject.

In the Spring of 2018, I taught six sections of the Supply Chain and Operations Management course using the Heizer/Render/Munson text to 647 students using the newly adopted modality. Students received the course content in a series of short online videos (138 in total) that I created, with deadlines for each chapter’s MyOMLab homework sets, quizzes, study modules and simulation programs. For the 5 classroom sessions, I developed scenarios similar to the computer simulations using printed exercises and Microsoft Excel worksheets. Upon completion of the group activities, the material provided in these sessions could then be used to help prepare the students to pass the 5 simulations in Forecasting, Inventory Management, Quality Management, Supply Chain Management, and Project Management provided by the text authors and Pearson.

Overall, my experience teaching this large student body for the first time, in this newly developed modality, was a success, but of course not without some challenges. However, there were two significant benefits using this new course design: 1) the face-to-face live sessions solidified learning in what I deem as the 5 pillars of supply chain and operations management and 2) having the opportunity to individually engage with over 600 students. I believe the college exceeded its expectations of the new format and will be a benchmark for other universities with a large student body.