"Managing Supply relationships for competitive advantage"

Learning Points:

• Understand what is meant by the supply chain.
• Understand the impact of Supply chain costs on competition.
• Understand what effects of lead-time and order visibility have on costs.
• Develop ideas for improvements to your Supply Chain.

What is it? Why do it? How is it done? Logistics

What is it?

A simulation that provides learners with the experience of managing in a supply chain. Participants make decisions on how many products to purchase in order to satisfy their customers with varying degrees of knowledge and information visibility. They also make decisions on how best to improve their supply chain performance and go on to implement these decisions.

Why do it?

The supply chain is an important competitive battleground that must be won in order to be successful. Understanding it's structure and dynamics is crucial to being able to formulate strategy and make decisions that impact your company's performance.

How is it done?

The simulation is easily configured for a variety of supply chain structures. Typically learners are grouped to represent companies in competing supply chains. For example: Retailer; Distributor; Wholesaler; Manufacturer. As many as four chains can run simultaneously.

The simulation is then run as a period of approximately 10 minutes which typically represents a year. Every 30 seconds, representing a week, information is passed to participants either to their hand held keypads or via the overhead projection screen. A decision is then asked for from each represented company how many products they wish to order on their upstream supplier.

The cycle of decisions and consequences are played out for the simulated year. The facilitator chooses when to end the cycles and leads the analysis and learning phase of the simulation. All the decision data has been automatically captured and is ready to be analysed in graphical form. Each participant can see how they contributed to the emerging pattern of costs and supply.

The number of years played out can be configured so that a stepped learning approach to the lesson can be achieved. Each year new demand patterns and different levels of knowledge visibility can be applied to replicate the effects of changing business environment and managing in different ways. The module comes pre configured with a number of ready to use templates and steps.

Logistics

Item			ABT Supply
Participant numbers:	•	Between 4 and 64
Software required:	•	Licenced ABT Impulse module	Yes
Equipment needed:	•	Power supply
	•	PC
	•	PC projector
	•	Set of Participator keypads and receiver	Yes
Facilities:	•	Enough space for all participants to see a centrally projected screen
	•	Plan for participants to be moved into groups
Facilitator:	•	Familiarity with software module and concepts	Yes
Technical assistance	•	For large groups	Yes