[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=““It’s like a flight simulator, but real.”“ font_container=“tag:h1|font_size:48|text_align:left“ use_theme_fonts=“yes“ css=“.vc_custom_1622108724264{margin-top: -25px !important;}“][vc_custom_heading text=“The business simulation game for future managers“ font_container=“tag:h2|font_size:28|text_align:left|color:%23676b6d“ use_theme_fonts=“yes“ css=“.vc_custom_1622108735838{padding-bottom: 10px !important;}“][vc_column_text]Pierre-Majorique Léger, HEC Montréal[/vc_column_text][ultimate_spacer height=“15″ height_on_tabs=“15″ height_on_tabs_portrait=“15″ height_on_mob_landscape=“15″ height_on_mob=“15″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=“In Short“ font_container=“tag:h2|font_size:34|text_align:left“ use_theme_fonts=“yes“ css=“.vc_custom_1622108794089{margin-top: -25px !important;}“ el_class=“box-headline“][vc_row_inner el_class=“box-content-wrapper“][vc_column_inner][vc_column_text]

The ERPsim game is designed to prepare students and prospective managers for the business world. Under real-life conditions the students have to manage a virtual company in a competitive market with an SAP system. The problem- and learning-based approach gives them a long-term understanding of how business and business processes work.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row css=“.vc_custom_1519752670572{margin-top: -10px !important;}“][vc_column][ultimate_spacer height=“30″ height_on_tabs=“15″ height_on_tabs_portrait=“15″ height_on_mob_landscape=“15″ height_on_mob=“15″][vc_column_text]Pierre-Majorique Léger and his colleagues developed a new type of simulation game for teaching Enterprise Systems in the early 2000s. Since then, it has won several awards. The ERPsim game is designed to prepare students and prospective managers for the business world. The students  use real software under a simulated condition and thus learn in the long term how business and business processes work.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: Let’s start with a very basic question: What is the ERP simulation game and why is it useful?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: I’ve been a professor of IT for the past 20 years. In early 2000 I was given the opportunity to teach SAP in classrooms to young professionalsa and I can tell you that teaching SAP is boring. So, I quickly realized that I needed to find a novel way to convey the concept of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Therefore we created this ERP simulation game
(ERPsim) with a team of colleagues.

The analogy we like to use is the fact that if we were training airplane pilots, we would have plane simulators and a virtual sky and we would provide them the technique or how to fly and then offer them the simulator and they could train themselves to become competent. It’s competent managers at using IT in organizations we want to train, let them make decisions, and learn how to leverage IT in their daily lives.

We created the ERPsim in that sense with this model of allowing for future managers to use IT in a competitive way. The analogy with the flight simulator is good, but it also does not reflect the fact that they are using the same software they would be using in an organization. In a flight simulator, it’s a fake playing in a virtual sky. Here is the real-life SAP they get to use. SAP is widely used by Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies.

So the idea is that teams of three to five students compete against the rest of the class. And because they like to play and learn and win, it becomes very competitive. Instead of focusing on a very long class about where to click on the screen, the students are motivated by winning the game, they learn on their own. It’s learning by doing, learning by mistakes, and discovering how to best use the software.

The main takeaway in this game is that the system is necessary but is not sufficient. What is important for a manager is to know how to use the system, use the analytics, collaborate with the other stakeholders, the other human, the other managers to decide because they’re competing in the same industry with the same system at the end of the day. The only difference is them. So it puts a lot of emphasis on what is the role of leaders and organizations in using and leveraging the value of IT in organizations.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: You said that your main target group are students in universities, but is your simulation game also used in companies?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: It’s a very good question. So there are two entities here. I’m a professor, and my primary goal has always been to create pedagogical activities for learners/students, how to leverage IT. We’re very proud of how we got so far with that, but we’re also very proud of the fact that there was a commercial spinoff that we co-created with my co-investor that is providing also the simulation adapted to the business world that is used worldwide with hundreds and hundreds of companies. Even SAP has the license to use our game to train their employees about their software, which is for me, the most interesting degree we get. So I’m very proud of the fact that it started in academia, but the commercial success is also very impressive.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: Just one question about SAP, because the ERP system you use for the simulation is from SAP. You said that even they are using your simulation game. Are you cooperating directly with SAP, or are you just using their system for simulation?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: Yes, we are a completely separate entity from SAP. They created the SAP University Alliances, which at the core of this compared to other software editors, like Oracle or Microsoft or any other, had this strong leadership at providing a community for professors like me. So from the beginning, it was a clear choice that we decided to develop our games and to be compatible with SAP. We have never tried it with other editors. So, the only software our game runs is on the SAP platform. But it’s completely independent of an architectural standpoint, we’re using connectors to SAP to generate our data, but nothing is on the SAP platform itself. It’s an external software pushing data, enabling things on the platform to make the game.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: Back to the academic surrounding: what is the educational and the pedagogical objective of this game?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: The idea here is that as a university professor, our job is not to train university students on a specific platform. It’s beyond that. It’s the notion of competency. It’s the enabling. Students will learn in business, for example in marketing, logistics, finance, accounting. The simulation enables them to understand all those concepts you’ve seen separately on to this single game integrated into the real-life enterprise system. They try to put in practice their knowledge and develop this competency at using these concepts together within a business case they have to solve. It’s good at the end that we train a lot of managers, future manager who have experience with using SAP. But beyond that, we also teach professors how to use these games in their classrooms to manage and integrate the ERPsim into class.
So far, we have trained more than 2000 faculties worldwide over more than 17 years in use and enabling this to continue to grow. We count over 6000 simulations per year by more than 45.000 students at more than 300 universities around the world. We are proud of this.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: Can you give us an idea of the business cases you’re choosing. How many do you have and how are they composed?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: We have a simulation at the undergraduate level. We have students at the MBA and executive MBA levels. Even some of our games can be used in college and even high school so that we can generate interest. The idea is to generate a career perspective for young students. So at the end of the day, we have several scenarios that are based on the best practice of SAP with regards to either logistics, manufacturing, distribution. So we create a fictitious scenario, but we use the best practices inspired in SAP to enable those scenarios. The students, get to run, for example, a manufacturing company and they’ll have to understand that they need to buy things, producing products, and selling that. And often the games are structured in a way so that the players of the game have specific roles in the company. Someone is in charge of selling, someone instead of manufacturing and producing the goods. Our game is there to enable feedback. So we deliver goods to the company. They have to manufacture it, they have to sell it. And a part of the learning process is the team players. They need to collaborate and do this right.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: How long does a game go on? Is it a whole semester or a short time period?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: We had to embed a lot of flexibility in the simulator from the start. We have some faculties who can only afford a three-hour event in their classroom to teach that. Some of them will over a few weeks use the game to create engagement. I love to do these one-day events. So bringing people in the same room and having this kind of boot camp simulation event, it works very well as an icebreaker. But it depends on the pedagogical objective and the time you have to put into this. It works very well in conjunction with other materials. So if you’re delivering a typical class, you may use a business case, for example, as an illustration, and then use the game and relate things together.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: The ERPsim has a problem-based learning approach. What do you mean by that?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: There’s a lot of medical schools to turn to this problem-based approach where you bring a case and teams of students have to solve a situation. You have a patient with symptoms for example. So what is unique in problem-solving is that the problem needs to be unstructured. That needs to be multiple solutions to a problem. It’s team-based learning. And the professor acts as a coach. So these are the four elements here. So it changes the way of learning and the way you teach in class becomes more dialectic with the students.
Very important in simulation and any games that you use for teaching is that the learning happens in the debriefing. It’s very important to set the tone that the game is there to create an engagement in the classroom. But at the end of the day, that cannot be just winners and losers. There must be only winners, only learners. So at the end of a game, whenever you win or lose, you must bring the classroom to appreciate what we learn as a group, even if you lost the game. So debriefing, taking time to have every participant explain how their experience, how they felt during the game, and what they learned, and sharing that is very important so that those who lost the game don’t go away.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: Have you designed other games around this and for what purpose?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: We have developed another game in the periphery of this simulation game. We like to call them – like in the board games world – expansion packs. We have some of those peripheral games where if you use the SAP system, we have other small games in the process that you can also use as a way to extend the knowledge and to some direction that the main game can provide.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=“IM+io: What comes next? Are you planning more around that?“ font_container=“tag:h3|text_align:left“][vc_column_text]PML: Yes, absolutley. We have many ideas. Our games so far have been very well suited to understand integration and the value of integration and collaboration, and it works very well. We want to target more the value of analytics. And we have several projects underway, including one called Cortex, which is a new breed of games specifically designed to learn artificial intelligence, new types of advanced statistical methods to a crowd of non-data scientists. So the main purpose is that anyone in the business school should understand exactly the value of those methods not to be able to run those methods, but to be able as a professional to interact with professionals. So we’re designing a new breed of games that are trying to go this round. We are also trying hard to bring other parts of the business school that has not been so far very well suited for our games, for example, HR-Management. So this is something that we have on our radar to try. These are examples of the direction that we are looking for as a way to expand the reach of the game into the domain that we’re not specifically designed with the game.

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