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Making Operations Management Fun: LittlefieldTechnologiesJulia Miyaoka,

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I N F O R M STransactions on Education

Vol. 5, No. 2, January 2005, pp. 80–83issn 1532-0545 �05 �0502 �0080 informs ®

doi 10.1287/ited.5.2.80© 2005 INFORMS

Making Operations Management Fun:Littlefield Technologies

Julia MiyaokaDepartment of Decision Sciences, College of Business, San Francisco State University,

jmiyaoka@sfsu.edu

One of the challenges of teaching operations man-agement is getting students to think beyond the for-mulas to solve real-world problems. Simulation gamescan be very helpful in getting students to thinkthrough problems in an environment with complexity,uncertainty, and constraints. However, for a simula-tion game to be effective, it must illustrate specificclass concepts, provide an appropriate level of com-plexity and be user friendly.This paper reviews Littlefield Technologies, a web-

based simulation game where student teams managea factory. I have found that Littlefield Technologies isan effective teaching tool that the students seem toreally enjoy. What I really like about Littlefield Tech-nologies is that the simulation games are stronglylinked to class concepts—the students are forced tothink logically about the problems that they are facingand they learn from iterative experimentation. Thisexperimentation is in contrast to homework problems,where I often see students plugging numbers into for-mulas without really understanding the problem.For the simulation, the students group themselves

into teams of three to four and each team receivesits own factory to manage for a period of time, typ-ically one to two weeks. The students are told thatthe objective of the game is to maximize the cashgenerated by the factory over the product lifetime.The factory assembles digital satellite system receiversfrom kits of components which are purchased froma single supplier. The assembly process consists offour steps that are carried out at three workstations.At Station 1, components are mounted and solderedonto PC boards. At Station 2, the boards are tested.At Station 3, the components are tuned. Finally, inthe fourth step, the boards go back to Station 2 forfinal testing. Figure 1 illustrates the factory layout as

the students see it on the simulation web page. Stu-dents can obtain information about their factory andmake decisions by clicking on the icons on the fac-tory layout. The simulator runs such that one hour inreal time is equivalent to one day in the factory. Thisallows the run time to represent the product lifetime.There is also a competitive aspect to the simulation.

Throughout the simulation teams are continuouslyranked from first to last based on their cash position.Thus, at any time during the game, each team cancompare 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 alot of time checking how they are doing against thecompetition. On a number of occasions, students havetold me that the competition drove them to makedecisions that they would have not made otherwise.Littlefield Technologies has two main assignments:

Capacity Management and Customer Responsive-ness. In addition, there are several variations of eachof these two games to choose from. I run CapacityManagement first, after covering forecasting, capacitymanagement and queuing. Several weeks later, I runCustomer Responsiveness, after covering inventorymanagement concepts such as the economic orderquantity (EOQ), safety stocks, re-order point, lot sizes,and set-up times.I have used Littlefield Technologies in both my

undergraduate and MBA operations managementcourses. Overall, I have used it in three undergraduateclasses with a total of 150 students and in one MBAclass with 40 students. I run the same Capacity Man-agement game for both the undergraduate and MBAclasses, but for the Customer Responsiveness gameI run a less complex version for the undergraduatestudents.

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Figure 1

1. Capacity Management GameIn the Capacity Management game, students can buyand sell machines at each of the three workstations.They can also change the way Station 2 (the testingstation) is scheduled. They can choose first-in-first-out (FIFO), give priority to step 2 or give priority tostep 4. The purpose of this assignment is for studentsto utilize queuing concepts and forecasting methodsto manage capacity. This game takes 7 days.In the simulation, customer demand is random and

the students are told that demand is expected to growat a linear rate for the first several months, stabilize,and then decline at roughly a linear rate. Customerorders that are not filled within the quoted lead timeincur a late penalty. If the order is too late, then itwill not generate any revenue. When the game beginsthere are 50 days of history and Station 1 is alreadynear 100 percent utilization. Thus, the students arefaced with a tradeoff between capacity and waitingtime. They can buy machines to reduce waiting timein order to meet the quoted lead time; however, theydon’t want to buy too many machines because themachines are expensive.I find that most students figure out that there is a

tradeoff between capacity and waiting time. However,many teams wait until the lead times become so longthat they are making little or no revenue before theybuy machines. Since these reactive teams generally donot do as well as proactive teams, students learn thatit is better to extrapolate station utilization by fore-casting demand in order to determine when utiliza-tion will approach 100%. In my MBA class, I found

that several teams went a step further by estimatingthe amount of cash that would be lost to delays if theydid not purchase a machine and comparing this lostrevenue to the cost of a new machine. These teamsfound that it was better to accept some lost revenueduring the peak months of demand rather than buyanother machine.

2. Customer Responsiveness GameIn the Customer Responsiveness game that I runin the MBA class, students make capacity andscheduling decisions as they did in the Capacity Man-agement game. In addition, students make inventoryand lot sizing decisions, choose between three cus-tomer contracts, and are extended a line of creditfrom which they can borrow money. The purpose ofthis assignment is for students to manage inventory,capacity and cash in order to maximize their cashposition at the end of the game. This game takes14 days.In the simulation, customer demand is random and

the students are told that the average demand willnot change over the product’s lifetime. The studentscan charge more if they are willing to quote shorterlead times. As a result, the students want to reducethe time that it takes to get orders through the factory.The most obvious way to reduce the lead time isto buy more machines; however, when the studentsbegin the game they face a cash constraint that pre-vents them from purchasing the machines that theyneed to meet the lead time requirements for the mostlucrative contract.

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This game enables students to gain a better under-standing of the behavior of production systems. Manystudents realize through experimentation that theiractions sometimes result in outcomes different fromwhat they expected. For example, since their cashposition at the beginning of the game limits themfrom buying capacity, many teams first experimentwith reducing the lot size to try to get orders throughthe factory faster. However, students find that setuptimes are so significant that smaller lot sizes causequeuing problems at stations 1 and 3, resulting ineven longer lead times.In addition, this game enables students to apply

course material in an environment that is somewhatrepresentative of a real situation. For example, sincethere are setup and inventory holding costs, someteams calculate the economic order quantity (EOQ).However, these teams find that the EOQ is so largethat implementation of it at the beginning of thegame will significantly deplete their cash. Since theyare trying to build up cash to buy machines, mostteams who calculate the EOQ conclude that it doesn’tmake sense to implement the EOQ until more cash isgenerated.It is possible for teams to go bankrupt; however,

a line of credit becomes available to all teams after acertain period of time, enabling the bankrupt teamsto borrow money and get back in the game.

3. Customer Responsiveness Game(Undergraduate Version)

The Customer Responsiveness game that I run in theundergraduate class is a simplified version of theCustomer Responsiveness game discussed above.The undergraduate version starts with a large cashposition, does not offer a line of credit, and does notallow modification of the lot size. As a result, thisgame focuses on managing capacity and inventory.This game takes 7 days.I have found that the undergraduate students

tend to perform less quantitative analysis than theMBA students. The undergraduates tend to rely moreon experimentation—they make decisions, observethe effects of their decisions, and then adjust theirdecisions. Although it would be better if they usedmore quantitative analysis to help in their decisionmaking, I find that this game is a wonderful wayto get them to think through problems logically.For example, at the beginning of the simulation thereorder point (ROP) is set low, resulting in stock outs.Most teams recognize that the ROP needs to at leastcover the expected demand over the lead time. Fur-thermore some of these groups will recognize thatsince there is uncertainty, it makes sense to add safetystock. Other groups do not immediately see the need

Table 1

Average score

These games contributed to my understanding ofcapacity management and inventory management.

4.1

In these games, I frequently found myself activelythinking about the simulation game and whatdecisions I should make.

4.2

As a result of these simulation games, my interest andcuriosity about operations management hasincreased.

3.9

for safety stock; however they observe that they occa-sionally stock out and this observation gets them toadjust their ROP to include some safety stock.

4. Grading and Post-ReviewFor each of the two simulations, each team is requiredto write up a report that summarizes the actions thatthey took during the simulation, why they took thoseactions, and, in retrospect, whether or not they didthe right thing. I base their grade on their ability toeffectively explain what they did and why and thequality of their analysis. For teams that finish at thetop of the standings, I give bonus points. AlthoughI do not penalize teams for performing poorly in thestandings, not surprisingly, there tends to be a cor-relation between the quality of the analysis and thefinal standings.On the day that the reports are due, I facilitate a

20 to 30 minute discussion of the simulation. I willask for volunteers to share what they did during thesimulation and why they took those actions. I wrapup with a discussion on the key learnings from thesimulation.

5. Student EvaluationsIn two of my undergraduate classes I have con-ducted student evaluations of Littlefield Technologies.The students were asked to indicate how stronglythey agreed with three statements with 5 representing“strongly agree” and 1 representing “strongly dis-agree.” The three statements and the average resultsof 67 evaluations are listed in the following table.The students were also given the opportunity to

write comments. Most comments were positive abouttheir experience with the simulations. Some of the stu-dents use the word “fun” to describe their experiencewith the game. A few students criticized the cost ofthe game, which is $20 per student. (Littlefield Tech-nologies charges $15 and the campus bookstore marksit up to $20.)

6. Instructor Work LoadI have found the work load for running these sim-ulation games to be very reasonable. The software

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that runs Littlefield Technologies resides on a centralserver at the company Responsive Learning Technolo-gies so instructors don’t need to worry about softwareinstallation, maintenance, or platform compatibility.Students access the simulation via the Internet andI have not yet had a single complaint from studentsabout access problems. Also, by using the assign-ments that have already been created, the instructordoesn’t have to worry about creating and debuggingassignments.There is some administrative work prior to the start

of the first simulation. The instructor needs to makesure that the student teams register for the game bythe time the simulation starts; otherwise, they will notbe able to play the game. The registration is web-based and students need to enter an access code thatthey get for their $20 fee. In order to motivate stu-dents to register on time, I tell them that registrationis due by a certain date (a couple days before the startof the simulation) and that it is worth one point ofthe ten point assignment.

The most time consuming part of this assignmentfor me was grading the reports. Last semester I had40 undergraduate teams, and I spent many hoursgrading reports.

7. SummaryTo summarize, I find Littlefield Technologies an ex-cellent simulation game for both undergraduateand MBA operations management courses. Studentsare forced to think logically about the problemsthat they are facing, they can apply class con-cepts and they learn from iterative experimentation.In addition, most of the students seem to reallyenjoy it.

∗ ∗ ∗To reference this paper, please use:

Miyaoka, J. (2005), “Making Operations Management Fun: Little-field Technologies,” INFORMS Transactions on Education, Vol. 5,No 2, http://archive.ite.journal.informs.org/Vol5No2/Miyaoka/.

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