The hours are flying by while Helen Bartels, Isha Bhamani, Katherine Chuei and Catee Herrick look at their laptops, waiting for class to begin. Demand for their company’s products has peaked and they’re preparing to offload everything before their market dries up.
The four industrial engineering students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are applying what they’ve learned in the first month of Industrial and Systems Engineering 604: Supply Chain Modeling: Logistics to a round-the-clock, time-lapsed simulation.
“It’s a really nice way to see, long term, what would happen,” says Bhamani, a senior. “If you have low periods of demand, you have to be able to work with the capacity that you have and how you’re sending out your products to be able to condense and use your money the most efficiently.”
Assistant Professor Yonatan Mintz, who created the course, started incorporating the simulation in 2023 in place of additional exams and a class project. Created by Responsive Learning Technologies, the game puts student teams in charge of the supply chain of a fictitious chemical manufacturer, all operating under identical conditions, with two years of simulation flying by during each weeklong assignment.
While the students compete to maximize their company’s profit during two rounds at different points of the semester, the bulk of their grades come from the written analysis they generate in the wake of the simulation.
“Exams and the class project are good, but they’re a little bit contrived,” says Mintz, whose background includes a year working in industry as a supply chain analyst. “The whole goal with a class like this is for students to learn using different models, and then by the end of the class be able to actually apply them in industry. But if your whole experience is homework problems where everything is very cleanly laid out, then that’s not how the real world works. It’s not like you go to your job and people are like, ‘Our costs are this, demand is this, put it into the formula.’”
Near the end of the spring 2024 semester, the students will test what they’ve learned in class about inventory management, transportation and supply chain network design on a more complex version of the game. They’ll have to weigh the risks and rewards of expanding into new markets and assess the varied demand profiles of industrial buyers versus consumers.
It’s the sort of dilemmas real companies face every day.
“My hope is that when students walk out of the course, they feel like they can actually use the models that we cover in order to help make decisions in the real world, that they can identify situations where the models make sense and situations when the models don’t make sense,” says Mintz. “When you go to an actual business and you have to help them manage their supply chain, don’t just plug stuff into the formula. Really sit down and think, ‘What’s true here? How does that map onto what I learned?’ And critically think about how to apply things.”
Top photo caption: Students Isha Bhamani, left, and Catee Herrick confer on strategy during a class session. Photos by: Tom Ziemer.
Assistant Professor Yonatan Mintz talks with students during a class session of ISyE 604.