The environment may be virtual, but the hands-on experience is all too real (see figure 1 below for a demonstration).

 

 

The Management Enterprise Resource Planning (MERPâ„¢) suite is available in an advanced version (the full package) for students, allowing an enhanced learning solution. The full package advanced version supports faculty academic and administrative needs as well.

 

Register for a trial version.

Learning benefits to students:

• Practical real world insights: Better positioning students to compete in the job market and bringing academic business theory to life.
• Combining operational management models with actual practice: Forecasting, inventory replenishment management, dispatch policy management, applied costing theory, and more.
• Macro and micro understanding: Viewing the big picture of a global organization, as well as coping with detailed operations management issues.
• Uncertainty is the truest business reality: MERPâ„¢ enables students to dictate the managerial policies for running a manufacturing company in the face of uncertainty, as in real business life.
• Cause and effect thinking: Students truly understand the effects of their operational management and collaborative business policies on their effective execution and business results.
• Realistic dynamic decision making: Based on daily events that affect the organizational outcomes. Students must choose which decisions to make and when, in parallel with the evolving KPI status.
• Reinforced learning: Unlimited practice runs, enabling testing, and retesting, either at the university or in free time at home. Students can log in and run scenarios repeatedly, always learning from mistakes and thus improving their business acumen.
• Competition based on shared online results: Students compete in random scenarios reflecting turbulent daily business life.

 

Figure 1: A MERP example of dynamic Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

 

 

How to learn the Virtual World organization?

 

The MERPâ„¢ solution provides very effective videos and flash tutorials, enabling students to learn in less than an hour how to run the virtual organization, although their time devoted to learning OM and increasing the Virtual World organization results will take much, much longer.

For supporting quick takeoff, it is suggested to first explore the videos. These five demo videos, varying from 2 to 9 minutes each, will demonstrate the flow as well as examples of dynamic management. We highly recommend watching the videos; viewing time is about 24 minutes for all five videos. We recommend first going through the flash tutorial "MERP Essential Tutorial" that lasts about 13 minutes (see and example: Figure 2); and then, the scenarios - specific tutorials that you will practice. This will add about 10 more minutes to each scenario. The following figure demonstrates a screen from the flash tutorial (The Board Room).

 

Figure 2: MERP Virtual World Boardroom Presentation

 

The videos and the tutorials can be accessed from within the "MERPâ„¢-Guide Student portal". The link is available at each of the pull down menus in MERP simulator.

 

The MERPâ„¢-Guide Student portal provides a comprehensive view of all help means and enables the user to search key words and phrases along all available help topics.(See Figure 3 bellow) 

 

Figure 3: The MERPâ„¢-Guide Student portal main menu

 

Another available tutorial is the guided runs of the scenario: In some scenarios there are guided runs providing help for understanding the decision making and its consequences. These guided runs can be reached after the scenario is opened at the File menu.