Teaching Supply Chain Dynamics Beyond the Beer Game

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is continuing to gain importance, both in industry and academia. Most SCM courses offered by universities and business schools are text-based. Approaches to illustrate the dynamic behaviour of supply chains are the well-known Beer Game and simulations. Even though the Beer Game allows students to see consequences of individual decisions for the entities of a linear supply chain, learning effects are limited because of the rather special setting. The paper discusses how we used discrete event simulation models described in the literature as requirements definitions for replicated model development. This teaching approach, whilst very ambitious, was highly successful. The students were familiarized with a graphical simulation language. Detailed engagement showed the students the importance of verifying and validating simulation models. Remarkably the degree of reproducibility of some published simulation results is rather low. Furthermore, we obtained hints as to why similar SCM models differ in their results.