Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

As modern supply chains continue to evolve into increasingly integrated global networks, logistics decisions that balance customer value with cost are becoming more complex. Today, customer performance criteria extend beyond price and quality to include several other dimensions, such as response time, product availability, service reliability, and environmental impact, among others. Decisions to augment performance in one area have direct or inverse impacts of varying magnitudes on performance metrics in other areas. Often, these relationships are not immediately obvious to individuals who are preparing for careers in logistics and supply chain management, resulting in decisions being conceptualized and framed in terms of linear cause-and-effect paradigms. Even when these relationships are recognized, the dynamics of a supply chain system make it difficult to prescribe the optimal performance conditions without conducting a sensitivity analysis to find leverage points from which solutions can be implemented to impact performance. Since a logistician must be able to view the supply chain as a system to design the resources, flows, and solutions that support an organization’s competitive strategy, learning tools that stimulate holistic thinking in regard to logistics can be helpful in developing an individual’s systems thinking skills. This paper evaluates the impact of a cloud-based, applied simulation of a global supply chain on undergraduate students’ ability to think in systemic terms.  Responses to questions examining various systems thinking competencies are evaluated based on a two-wave longitudinal study, before and after the simulation, to determine the impact on holistic thinking skills of students.