All of us in this community use SAP in teaching from different perspectives, and I always find it exciting to read how, with which different learning objectives, and in which learning contexts SAP is used.
Of course, I am particularly interested in where colleagues who teach in the same area as I do—namely process management and ERP systems—place their emphasis and what experiences they have with designing exercises.
So that I am not only benefiting from others, I am also happy to share one or another experience from my lectures on process management and ERP systems.
In this lecture, I convey the fundamentals of E2E processes, show how these tasks are handled one after another across different departments, what interests the individual departments have, and I also discuss with the students goal conflicts or possible communication problems between the departments at the interfaces. To illustrate such an E2E process, I also make use of the opportunity to have the students execute the complete process in SAP and assume different roles within this process. The process starts with a customer order, goes through an MRP run, the procurement of raw materials, production processing (two-stage), delivery, billing, and ends with the receipt of payment. As Matt Dyki has already mentioned in his post, the students have the unique opportunity to get to know the process completely in different roles.
This learning experience is the basis for the students to be able to somehow understand this buzzword “end-to-end process.” For us instructors, a major task is to make all these buzzwords—which are very abstract and, for students who have never been in a company, hardly understandable—tangible and experiential.
Now the students know the overall sequence and can also understand quite well how the tasks are connected. But have they thereby already experienced what process management is all about? Have the students been able to experience how valuable it is to have an overview of the entire process flow?
My assumption was: rather not. Each student essentially handled this process on their own and at most had problems with execution in SAP, but did not experience and did not feel what possible communication problems at the interfaces could mean.
I explained it and saw that the students made an effort to understand what I mean when I describe and explain this fundamental issue to them. But I wanted to make this problem tangible for the students.
We now simulate this process run as in a company, and the students experience and feel what communication problems are, what interfaces between departments are—and how important an understanding of processes is.
The exercise itself is quite simple. After the students have become familiar with all tasks within the complete process flow, we replicate the situation as it is in a company. We form individual classic departments, such as Purchasing, Sales, Production Planning, Production, Financial Accounting, etc., each responsible only for its specific task. For this, we always have two to three students in a department. Each group receives a precise task description that builds on the tasks of the E2E process. That is, we use the same APPS and the same master data.
The task for everyone is now to process as many processes as possible from order to incoming payment within three hours. We have a benchmark that currently stands at 16 complete processes.
Don’t be afraid of chaos!
You might now be saying this won’t work. I say: endure the chaos at the beginning. The students need a little time to understand the idea of the exercise and to organize themselves. After that, all groups so far have participated with great eagerness and enjoyment.
The instructor functions only as a coach and mainly helps at the beginning and explains when questions arise.
In the following session, we evaluate the processes. Where were the bottlenecks? At which point did particularly many processes get stuck, or where were there long waiting times, and what were the causes?
Would you like to try this as well? I would be happy to exchange ideas or further develop the idea.
Best regards
Uta Mathis
Business Process Management and ERP-Systems
Department Business and Engineering
Hochschule Esslingen – University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Bluesky
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