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Research Details
The Mexico-China Sourcing Game: Teaching Global Dual Sourcing, Informs Transactions on Education
Abstract
We describe a three-hour class on global dual sourcing built around a game that demonstrates the challenges in making operational decisions and transfers recent academic insights to the classroom. Student teams manage a firm with access to a responsive but expensive supply source (Mexico) and a cheap but remote source (China). Each team must determine a sourcing strategy to satisfy random demand that is revealed throughout the game. In each period, teams place orders to both sources and manage two assets: inventory and their bank account. The goal is to maximize each team's value (final bank balance). During the debriefings, we analyze the policies use by different teams along both financial and operational metrics, present the optimal strategy, and summarize the experimental learning points.
Type
Article
Author(s)
Gad Allon, Jan A. Van Mieghem
Date Published
2010
Citations
Allon, Gad, and Jan A. Van Mieghem. 2010. The Mexico-China Sourcing Game: Teaching Global Dual Sourcing. Informs Transactions on Education.(3): 105-112.