Littlefield – Preparing you for the BIG field
Reetu Gupta, TMMBA Student
We just finished 3rd quarter – another fast speed, full of excitement and awesome experience. All three courses this quarter were very interesting but in my mind crown goes to Littlefield game. This was a game that Kamran Moinzadeh put in as part of out Operations and Supply Chain Management course.
Kamran prepared us well for the game. We went thru queuing theories and inventory management before the game was kicked off on Nov 22nd. Game lasted exactly one week. It gave an opportunity to apply the text book concepts into an almost real scenario without doing a real damage. I’m sure you won’t give your factory to a new MBA graduate. But this game gave us that opportunity.
There are some key interesting points about this game exercise. I think biggest being the competition among the teams. It was a very healthy competition. Every one was watching every one and trying to figure out other teams’ moves. Sometimes it felt like Chess. I remember figuring out the inventory order of 2 teams above ours and wondering what they are doing. Every team was trying to earn big money and come out as the winner. But Sysphis team beat us all. Though we argue that in long run our team would have easily taken them over since we have better revenue stream coming in because of our bigger investment in machines.
In next class while discussing the learning and lessons from the game, we found that each team took the similar approach for attacking the problem. Almost all created a humongous spreadsheet and we all share the love of excel.
With the learning gained from playing the game, some of us are looking for another opportunity to play again. Apparently there is a national competition on this hosted by MIT. We’ll see if that happen in 2010.
Now off to 5th quarter. Once someone told me in the EEC hallways “Death comes in 5th quarter”. We’ll see how well we survive that one.
In the mean time Happy Holidays!
