One such activity is the Red Bead Experiment that was a feature of Dr. Deming's four day seminars on quality. This demonstration took participants from the audience and helped drive home some of the points he made. Heads Up Corporation, an abbreviated exercise, makes many of the same points and has been used successfully as a learning tool in statistics and quality classes in the United States and in France. This exercise can be finished in less than half the time Dr. Deming took for the Red Bead Experiment. The presentation will give an overview of this exercise and how it has been used.
Many universities use simulations of real world activities as a part of the education process.
The Fundamentals of Management classes at Clemson University have been using a McGraw-Hill Publishing simulation for a number of years. During a fifteen week semester, there are generally about ten quarters of play where the teams make a number of management decisions including production, inventory, marketing, and investment decisions. The simulation digests the information supplied by each team and provides each team with an income statement, a cash flow statement, a balance sheet, and summaries of sales, materials and labor. The teams then analyze these results to make decisions for the next period. Previously, students submitted written decisions to the instructor who entered the data and ran the simulation on a mainframe computer.