Learning Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) through Business Simulation Game

Abstract

Ever since its inception in the 1980s, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been readily making inroads into enterprise computing, became the focus of innovation, replacing traditional functional Management Information Systems, and finally established itself as the main stream of enterprise computing [1]. Nowadays every enterprises run ERP systems of some sort. ERP systems are also the backbone of Business Intelligence as well as Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. In this workshop, we shall focus on learning 2 key concepts of ERP: (1) Business Processes Integration that integrates Business Functions across Business Units (2) Managing supply to meet demand. How to make these two key concepts come alive for participants learning ERP is critical especially if they do not have business background. We design a learning activity system that is inspired by SECI [2] and Cascading Modes of Communication (CMC) knowledge creation theory [3, 4 & 5]. An ERP business simulation game1 is deployed as Socialization space to engender experiential knowledge about ERP among its participants. These experiences became the basis on which, the participants Externalize what they learnt about key ERP concepts, which is shared among team members and the entire group of participants with the objective to engender Combination of knowledge into a structured game plan. Finally, the game plan is to be Internalized through another round of the game play, that in turn, fosters a new round of knowledge creation cycle.