CLODE
(Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise)
Simulation sparks supply chain learning
Faculty involved with the Broad School’s Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise (CLODE), completing its second year of operation in August 2006, have been working on a new simulation training platform to help executives and students learn the intricacies of international supply chain management.
CLODE has been working on the Supply Chain Operations Decision Environment (SCODE) for about a year, says David Closs, the John H. McConnell Chaired Professor of Business Administration. SCODE is a computerized logistics simulation that plays as a supply chain. Those using the simulation will be playing against an environment controlled by the game’s administrators – faculty running SCODE.
“It’s equivalent to a race course,” Closs says. “We define what the course looks like, and the teams define the car.”
The teams of executives and/or students will receive summary data in a manual detailing the type of market against which they will be competing. Then the teams will decide how to set up their supply chains by making decisions including outsourcing, plant capacity, marketing, distribution center capacity and international operations.
Once the teams finalize their system design, the program gives the teams the production results of their decisions. Each round simulates one week, and the teams will spend at least an hour analyzing the results before inputting new information about their supply chains. Executives using the program could go through two or three rounds a day while students might only do one per class period.
The general framework for SCODE is based on another simulation program currently used by the Broad School. The Michigan State University Logistics Simulation (LOGA) replicates an interactive competitive environment in which Simulation sparks supply chain learning teams compete against each other. LOGA, which has undergone eight updates in its more than 40 years of existence, has been used by more than 2,000 students and 4,000 executives, Closs says, adding that SCODE is not an update of LOGA because it represents a different type of supply chain environment.
Ideas such as collaboration and outsourcing, essential to international supply chains, are central to SCODE.
“We felt we needed to incorporate those into the tool,” Closs says.
Closs says CLODE hopes to have a prototype of SCODE ready by January 2007. The software will be designed to run on stand-alone PC platforms, and data will be entered and reported using Microsoft Excel. Sample groups of graduate students and executives will be the first ones to test the new program.
