Making Operations Management Fun: Littlefield Technologies

One of the challenges of teaching operations management is getting students to think beyond the formulas to solve real-world problems. Simulation games can be very helpful in getting students to think through problems in an environment with complexity, uncertainty, and constraints. However, for a simulation game to be effective, it must illustrate specific class concepts, provide an appropriate level of complexity and be user friendly. This paper reviews Littlefield Technologies, a webbased simulation game where student teams manage a factory. I have found that Littlefield Technologies is an effective teaching tool that the students seem to really enjoy. What I really like about Littlefield Technologies is that the simulation games are strongly linked to class concepts—the students are forced to think logically about the problems that they are facing and they learn from iterative experimentation. This experimentation is in contrast to homework problems, where I often see students plugging numbers into formulas without really understanding the problem. For the simulation, the students group themselves into teams of three to four and each team receives its own factory to manage for a period of time, typically one to two weeks. The students are told that the objective of the game is to maximize the cash generated by the factory over the product lifetime. The factory assembles digital satellite system receivers from kits of components which are purchased from a single supplier. The assembly process consists of four steps that are carried out at three workstations. At Station 1, components are mounted and soldered onto PC boards. At Station 2, the boards are tested. At Station 3, the components are tuned. Finally, in the fourth step, the boards go back to Station 2 for final testing. Figure 1 illustrates the factory layout as the students see it on the simulation web page. Students can obtain information about their factory and make decisions by clicking on the icons on the factory layout. The simulator runs such that one hour in real time is equivalent to one day in the factory. This allows the run time to represent the product lifetime. There is also a competitive aspect to the simulation. Throughout the simulation teams are continuously ranked from first to last based on their cash position. Thus, at any time during the game, each team can compare its cash status to that of all the other teams. This competition really motivates a number of teams. Many students get addicted to the game and spend a lot of time checking how they are doing against the competition. On a number of occasions, students have told me that the competition drove them to make decisions that they would have not made otherwise. Littlefield Technologies has two main assignments: Capacity Management and Customer Responsiveness. In addition, there are several variations of each of these two games to choose from. I run Capacity Management first, after covering forecasting, capacity management and queuing. Several weeks later, I run Customer Responsiveness, after covering inventory management concepts such as the economic order quantity (EOQ), safety stocks, re-order point, lot sizes, and set-up times. I have used Littlefield Technologies in both my undergraduate and MBA operations management courses. Overall, I have used it in three undergraduate classes with a total of 150 students and in one MBA class with 40 students. I run the same Capacity Management game for both the undergraduate and MBA classes, but for the Customer Responsiveness game I run a less complex version for the undergraduate students.