Simulating business and operations management - a learning environment forthe electronics industry

The Training Factory for the Electronics Industry has been working since 19 99. It is a common project of several companies and educational organizatio ns. It is a kind of network project created in conjunction with the Pro Ele ctronica project of Oulu regional centre excellence programme. The purpose of the project has been to create a learning environment where industrial e ngineering, operations management of entire production line, logistics and business in the electronics industry can be simulated and learned. The hist ory of business simulations in general is more than 40 years long. Since fi rst introduced the development of simulations has been diverse. The main pu rpose of business games or simulations is to imitate the real decision maki ng process or environment of business. Although some simulations are better and some worse, the method used in all simulations is a form of experienti al learning. In the Institute for Management and Technological Training (PO HTO) there is long experience of simulations and the method of learning by doing. Green-Power (TM) is the first generation training factory aimed espe cially at the process industry. Because of the good experience the second g eneration training factory - OperEx-Power (TM) - was constructed to corresp ond to the specific features of the electronics industry, The main purpose of this article is to present the created participating learning environmen t in total and describe the managerial functions of OperEx-Power (TM) conne cted to production automation. The second goal is to describe the construct ion process of the environment, based on the Kolb (1984) theory of experien tial learning and using a constructive framework. Conclusions are at the en d of the review based on experiences from training events. (C) 2001 Elsevie r Science BN. All rights reserved.