We had an operation today

Every single MBA student converged in the sports hall early on Friday morning. Was it a Sports Day? Wrong!
It was a simulation exercise in Process Flow Design, as part of the Operations Management course. Basic guidelines and details of the simulation were provided in our case packs, and each team received a kit a few days ago. This kit comprised of tools and components of the final product. It appeared to be a simple exercise, although I had never studied engineering in my life.
But that was only till the early hours of this morning...
Everything was real about this exercise. There were technical specifications for everything: length of wires; design of three different models of product; conditions for orders and delivery; price and quality of final product; cost for components; work in progress and inventory holding. We had to indent every component to manufacture the products.
We finalised our strategy last night and chose the most appropriate process flow, in our opinion, for manufacturing.
Our team (Red 7) had been merged with a few others to ensure that there were equal numbers in the teams. Maria (Colombia) and I joined Red 3 team with Marieke Van Houwelingen (Netherlands), Herbert Kamuntu (Uganda), Kartik Ranganath (India), Andrew Weatherall (Britain) and Simon Clarke (Britain).
We were pitted against Blue 7 - Nobuhiro Hase (Japan), Ian McDougall (Britain), Gautam Sharma (India), Robin Cassidy (Britain), Andy Holloway (Wales), Jana Villa (Germany).
We had our first shot at manufacturing the orders. The objective was to manufacture maximum orders profitably. While one team worked as Manufacturers, the other team played the role of Auditors. We received an order every 30 seconds and we had to deliver the orders in the sequence they came. A quality failure would mean disrupting the entire sequence of events. We were very confident that our plan would deliver the best results. But only time would tell.
We started the manufacturing, armed with our tools and guide posts. After a nervous start, we ended up manufacturing 17 pieces in 20 minutes. Compared to the average ordering speed of 30 seconds, we had not done well enough. The tragedy was that we hit small bottlenecks in our process and had messed up.
Once the table was cleaned up, Blue 7 had their go at manufacturing, while we audited. Much as we would have liked to believe that Blue 7 had learnt from our experience, it would be unfair to take away the credit from them. They were well prepared and it showed in the end result. They made 23 pieces. There were flashes of learning for me during the whole exercise - how a link in the chain can impact the overall goal, how a micro view about one’s own function can lead one to miss out the overall picture, how important cash flow can be. After all, we had delivered 17 pieces but had negative cash flow. This was not only because we had produced less, but also because we had too much stock as work in progress. This was the overwhelming message of the entire simulation.
A tea break later, we discussed our observations as auditors with the other team. All teams were then suggested to have one more round at manufacturing and they were free to modify their approach. The group recommended that Blue 7 take the challenge again and pick up our particularly expert assembler to modify the roles. They swapped one of their members for Herbert (Uganda) and it worked. Blue 7 made a whopping 43 pieces this time.
Post lunch, we all assembled in the lecture room where the winners of the two rounds got bottles of champagne – Blue 1 and Green 2. We also studied and analysed the relation of theory and practice that we had experienced first hand. But the true taste of the exercise was in the compliment our batch got from the two professors – “Your performance in this simulation was the best in the history of Cranfield MBAs”.
This was action – or Operations Management!