Game—Rolling the Dice on Global Supply Chain Sustainability: A Total Cost of Ownership Simulation

Abstract

Sustainability in management education is a potential solution to societal challenges, influencing students' worldviews and attitudes to contribute to a more profound social change. Through this innovative dice-based classroom simulation, students are exposed to supply chain sustainability, total cost of ownership (TCO), and risk management while also understanding their linkages through effective instructor debrief. Student teams compete by selecting sourcing options such as supplier location, transportation methods, and sustainability reputation from a menu, then see how their decisions fare as the product-line life cycle is simulated with a dice. The debrief facilitated by the instructor compares and contrasts results across the teams, generating insights into the interrelationships between supply chain sustainability choices, TCO, and risk management. Successfully conducted by multiple instructors, in multiple countries, and across all levels of management education (undergraduate, master of science, and executive master of business administration), survey results (n = 350) plus a pilot study (n = 31) confirm that this dice-based simulation accomplishes multiple learning objectives while also providing a highly engaging experiential learning classroom environment for this sample.

Game changer: Cloud‐based classroom interactions powered by Google Sheets

“…Some notable applications include Cox III and Walker (2006) using blue, red, and white poker chips to represent three products when playing the Beer Game; Drake and Mawhinney (2006) using Lego bricks to highlight the flow of materials, products, and information along supply chains; and Billington (2004) creating a Just-in-time game by assigning students to four work centers in which they fold paper into airplanes. Alternatively, some OSCM games use props to introduce randomness to classroom games by flipping coins or rolling dice to simulate random outputs (Luo & Munson, 2022) and supply chain uncertainties (Cole & Snider, 2020). With the assistance of these props, students experience hands-on activities and interact with others to make real-time decisions.…”

Game—Gimme a Better Price! A Negotiation Role Play on B2B Pricing in Hotel Revenue Management

“…After two years of very positive but only qualitative feedback from the students, we adapted a student survey from Cole and Snider (2020) to collect quantitative results on how students perceived the third version of the role play. We received 28 responses, a satisfactory response rate from a cohort of 36 students.…”