Teaching supply chain management using a modified beer game: an action learning approach

Abstract

The Beer Game is a famous business simulation game in logistics management courses. This paper provides a teaching method that integrates the game's concept into the curriculum of a course, helping students not only to understand the challenges of managing supply chains, but also to apply knowledge learnt from the course to solve complex logistics problems. Adopting an action learning approach, the teaching method was used in an undergraduate supply chain course with 254 undergraduate students. The results show that by using this strategy, students can actively acquire supply chain knowledge. Using a combination of lectures and tutorial sessions the students proactively adopted new techniques, such as collaborative forecasting systems, vendor-managed inventory and strategic partnering, to improve supply chain performance. This paper introduces a new teaching method and evaluates it in a supply chain programme to make teaching of supply chain management challenging and interesting.

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