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informs
doi 10.1287/ited.5.2.80
2005 INFORMS
I N F O R M S
Transactions on Education
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the students see it on the simulation web page. Students can obtain information about their factory and
make decisions by clicking on the icons on the factory layout. The simulator runs such that one hour in
real time is equivalent to one day in the factory. This
allows the run time to represent the product lifetime.
There is also a competitive aspect to the simulation.
Throughout the simulation teams are continuously
ranked from rst to last based on their cash position.
Thus, at any time during the game, each team can
compare its cash status to that of all the other teams.
This competition really motivates a number of teams.
Many students get addicted to the game and spend a
lot of time checking how they are doing against the
competition. On a number of occasions, students have
told me that the competition drove them to make
decisions that they would have not made otherwise.
Littleeld Technologies has two main assignments:
Capacity Management and Customer Responsiveness. In addition, there are several variations of each
of these two games to choose from. I run Capacity
Management rst, after covering forecasting, capacity
management and queuing. Several weeks later, I run
Customer Responsiveness, after covering inventory
management concepts such as the economic order
quantity (EOQ), safety stocks, re-order point, lot sizes,
and set-up times.
I have used Littleeld Technologies in both my
undergraduate and MBA operations management
courses. Overall, I have used it in three undergraduate
classes with a total of 150 students and in one MBA
class with 40 students. I run the same Capacity Management game for both the undergraduate and MBA
classes, but for the Customer Responsiveness game
I run a less complex version for the undergraduate
students.
One of the challenges of teaching operations management is getting students to think beyond the formulas to solve real-world problems. Simulation games
can be very helpful in getting students to think
through problems in an environment with complexity,
uncertainty, and constraints. However, for a simulation game to be effective, it must illustrate specic
class concepts, provide an appropriate level of complexity and be user friendly.
This paper reviews Littleeld Technologies, a webbased simulation game where student teams manage
a factory. I have found that Littleeld Technologies is
an effective teaching tool that the students seem to
really enjoy. What I really like about Littleeld Technologies is that the simulation games are strongly
linked to class conceptsthe students are forced to
think logically about the problems that they are facing
and they learn from iterative experimentation. This
experimentation is in contrast to homework problems,
where I often see students plugging numbers into formulas without really understanding the problem.
For the simulation, the students group themselves
into teams of three to four and each team receives
its own factory to manage for a period of time, typically one to two weeks. The students are told that
the objective of the game is to maximize the cash
generated by the factory over the product lifetime.
The factory assembles digital satellite system receivers
from kits of components which are purchased from
a single supplier. The assembly process consists of
four steps that are carried out at three workstations.
At Station 1, components are mounted and soldered
onto PC boards. At Station 2, the boards are tested.
At Station 3, the components are tuned. Finally, in
the fourth step, the boards go back to Station 2 for
nal testing. Figure 1 illustrates the factory layout as
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Figure 1
1.
2.
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This game enables students to gain a better understanding of the behavior of production systems. Many
students realize through experimentation that their
actions sometimes result in outcomes different from
what they expected. For example, since their cash
position at the beginning of the game limits them
from buying capacity, many teams rst experiment
with reducing the lot size to try to get orders through
the factory faster. However, students nd that setup
times are so signicant that smaller lot sizes cause
queuing problems at stations 1 and 3, resulting in
even longer lead times.
In addition, this game enables students to apply
course material in an environment that is somewhat
representative of a real situation. For example, since
there are setup and inventory holding costs, some
teams calculate the economic order quantity (EOQ).
However, these teams nd that the EOQ is so large
that implementation of it at the beginning of the
game will signicantly deplete their cash. Since they
are trying to build up cash to buy machines, most
teams who calculate the EOQ conclude that it doesnt
make sense to implement the EOQ until more cash is
generated.
It is possible for teams to go bankrupt; however,
a line of credit becomes available to all teams after a
certain period of time, enabling the bankrupt teams
to borrow money and get back in the game.
3.
Table 1
Average score
These games contributed to my understanding of
capacity management and inventory management.
In these games, I frequently found myself actively
thinking about the simulation game and what
decisions I should make.
As a result of these simulation games, my interest and
curiosity about operations management has
increased.
4.1
4.2
3.9
for safety stock; however they observe that they occasionally stock out and this observation gets them to
adjust their ROP to include some safety stock.
4.
5.
Student Evaluations
6.
I have found the work load for running these simulation games to be very reasonable. The software
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7.
Summary