Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58910
LEARNING PROGRAMS TO BUSY EXECUTIVES AROUND THE WORLD." —Raymond Smith, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business podcasts encourage and improve interactions between the school and its community. At HEC, educators consider higher education's use of digital players to be of value not only to the community, but also to research- ers exploring the trend, explains Valérie Gauthier, associate dean of the HEC MBA. As Duke has done, TOOLS OF THE TRADE ERPsim Tests Students' Decision-making Skills Under Real-time Conditions A new simulation system in enter- prise resource planning (ERP) was recently tested for the first time at Canada's HEC Montreal in Quebec. The simulation software, ERPsim, was designed by Pierre-Majorique Léger, Gilbert Babin, and Jacques Robert, professors at HEC Montreal's Department of Information Technolo- gies, and Robert Pellerin, a profes- sor from the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. The software is compatible with SAP R/3, a soft- ware package in the mySAP Busi- ness Suite. To run the simulation, schools must be a part of the SAP University Alliance. Forty MBA students used ERPsim to participate in the final exam com- petition for their Enterprise IS (ERP) course, part of HEC's MBA in Eng- lish. The daylong simulation pitted eight teams of five students against each other in managing a company that manufactures muesli cereal. The software presented students with a simulated economy where they had to manufacture up to six cereal vari- eties; purchase raw materials; bag and package the cereal; and handle inventory, sales, and distribution. BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006 57 The software is the only one of its kind, say its designers, because it gives students the opportunity to try out an ERP system, which many large companies use to manage their busi- ness processes, under realistic market conditions. Those conditions include changing interest rates, prices of raw materials, and harvest quality. Stu- dents' decision-making and operations management skills were tested in all areas except for data on orders and deliveries, which were automatically generated by the ERPsim software. Leger, Robert, and Babin plan to publish a textbook on using the simulation system titled ERP Simula- tion Games with SAP R/3. The book is scheduled to be available by Sep- tember 2007. Leger, the initiator of the ERPsim project, also has written a white paper on the process, "Using a Simulation Approach to Teach ERP Concepts." To contact the creators of ERPsim, or read the full paper, visit www.hec.ca/sap/ERPsim/docs.html. HEC plans to study how students use their iPods. Researchers hope to provide more information about how such technology will be useful on campus and in the workplace. Digital audio and video players provide business schools an oppor- tunity to stretch their offerings in new directions, says Raymond Smith, Fuqua's associate dean for executive education. Says Smith, "New learning technologies allow us to think differently about the ways we design and deliver learning programs to busy executives around the world." To read Duke's full report on its use of the iPod in 2004–2005, visit cit.duke.edu/pdf/ipod_ initiative_04_05.pdf.