Wednesday, June 18, 2008, Hotel Golf Libertas, 9:00 - 10:30 

Chair:
Kai Riemer, Assistant Professor & Chair of the e-Collaboration Research Group
European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS), University of Münster, Germany

Presenters:
Robert B. Johnston, Professor & John Sharkey Chair of Information Systems and Organisation
Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), University College Dublin, Ireland
Stefan Schellhammer, Researcher
European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS), University of Muenster, Germany

Workshop outline

The idea of this workshop is to introduce the beer distribution game as a means to im-prove teaching business-to-business eCommerce to both freshmen undergraduate stu-dents, as well as executives and masters students. In doing so, the aim of this workshop is threefold: Firstly, we want to introduce the beergame as a useful role-play teaching method by playing a demonstration game with all interested workshop participants during the workshop session. For doing so, we use a software that was developed at the Univer-sity of Muenster and that can easily be administered in the workshop using an ad-hoc network of laptop computers. Secondly, we want to demonstrate how the beergame can be used to provide students with a more profound understanding of the reasons why eCommerce technologies are used in contemporary supply chains to exchange informa-tion and to facilitate collaboration. Finally, we want to share with the Bled community our experiences in using the beergame in eCommerce courses and also make available our software under a free-to-use educationware licence model.

Background

The beergame is a role-play simulation game in which students play a four stage supply chain that produces and delivers a physical product (e.g. beer). In doing so, the aim of the players is rather simple: each of the four groups has to fulfil the incoming orders of beer by placing orders with the next upstream party. Since communication and collaboration is not allowed between supply chain stages, the players invariably create the so called bull-whip effect, which refers to the effect that the amount of periodical orders amplifies up-stream in the supply chain towards the production end, thus causing a range of opera-tional problems. The bullwhip effect is a well-known phenomenon and a prominent symptom of coordination problems in supply chains.
In using the beergame to create the bullwhip effect students of eCommerce courses can experience first hand, not only the problems of lack of information sharing and collabora-tion in supply chains, but also the main causes for the creation of the bullwhip effect. Henceforth, in introducing eCommerce measures in the later sessions of an eCommerce course, students can relate to these topics through their own experiences gained during the beergame.

All those among the people attending the Bled eConference who have an interest in teach-ing eCommerce, especially those interested in interactive (role-play) teaching methods.