Intensive course by Dr. Shoensleben

SDM invited Professor Paul Schoensleben from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) for an intensive course “Supply Chain Management in a Nutshell” as a part of the “Supply Chain Management” course taught by Professor Nakano and Assistant Professor Minato. The intensive course consisted of three practical games (“Serious Games”) with the aim of getting students to intuitively learn the importance of supply chain management from the basic concept through application techniques by participating in each game as players. 

First was the Logistics Game, in which students must manufacture a mobile phone using Lego blocks. They are assigned to manage each process of manufacturing mobile phones; taking orders, assembly, quality control, and distribution, and learned how to design the overall system that optimizes quality, cost and distribution while adapting to the continuously changing customer requirements.

Students playing the games

Next was the Beer Distribution Game; students took on the roles of manufacturer, primary and secondary wholesaler, and retailer to see firsthand how inventory control issues due to fluctuating demand increased when the number of intermediaries between the customer and the manufacturer increased. In the final game, the Constraints Game, students learned to find the bottleneck in a supply chain, and how improving the bottleneck or designing a whole system corresponding to the bottleneck can achieve the desired inventory control and cost reduction. SDM will further enhance our cooperation with ETH in research and education and actively promote various programs with them, such as student exchanges.