Making a Case for Advancing SCM: Applied Supply Chain Management

Cases are insightful vehicles for learning. They put those who work on real-life cases into the shoes of a manager who faces a particular challenge. As such, cases allow a professor or trainer to give learning groups the experience of working on real-life challenges inside the classroom. Course participants enjoy working with cases because they usually lead to vigorous discussions among case team members and among course participants as a whole. The fact that cases are concrete make the content sticky: we all remember certain cases for a very long time, if not forever. Cases are also bridges. They bridge the gap between conceptual models and frameworks on the one hand and the complexity and detail of the real world on the other hand. However, to serve as a bridge, the case story as such must be interesting to read from a journalistic standpoint. In addition, to serve as effective teaching material, the case must offer the trainers and teachers some background of a conceptual and pedagogical nature.

This experiential learning format turns students from case users into case producers: students in teams will develop exciting real-life case studies and do so on the basis of their own consulting projects with a company (as exceptions, cases can also be based on secondary data).

The course is limited to 24 participants.

• Gain in-depth insight into the application of management concepts in practice, especially in the key functional area SCM
• Analyze and interpret how companies tackle practical challenges in different fields of SCM (Purchasing, Logistics)
• Structure, critically reflect and solve practical problems that ex ante are not well-defined, and transfer them into written form
• Evaluate different decision options and propose recommendations for possible actions to companies
• Develop entrepreneurial capabilities by designing out-of-the-box solutions to specific company problems
• Communicate and coordinate with supply chain-related functions in well-known companies (including managing the interface to the company)
• Collaborate within student teams and manage the student project independently
• Improve skills in case work by understanding the instructor’s perspective