Abstract:

Typical organisational goals promoted by knowledge management (KM) are being complemented with resilience-related objectives in many organisations worldwide. The need for resilience goes beyond companies, reaching their supply chains in a concept known as enterprise and supply chain resilience (ESCR). In complex times where organisations must learn to deal with disruptive events (DEs), ranging from internal events like inventory stockouts to external events, such as pandemics and wars, knowledge sharing becomes critical. The main objective of this work is to present a teaching case (TC) developed using instructional design principles, which aims to teach ESCR in real-world scenarios.

The proposed TC has clear goals, objectives, and learning outcomes, it intends to engage the students in situations that require problem-solving and decision-making. It is an open problem case with multiple perspectives where solutions can vary since DEs are difficult to predict and manage. The case includes detailed context information for the reader to understand and diagnose the situation and, after that, develop and create an action plan and a logic model to solve the problems related to the critical elements of the case. The TC presents a real-life situation where an organisation and its supply chain are facing a critical incident, an impactful DE, which is causing severe problems to the flow of products between customers and suppliers. This case has no unique answer, and the solutions require critical thinking.

To complement the proposed TC, this work includes a teaching note clarifying the context of the case and its learning objectives. It provides questions to guide the instructor to promote participation among the readers.

The proposed TC can be used to train professionals in an organisation or teach ESCR concepts to university students, whether in an online class or a classroom. Participants must be segmented into groups to solve the case since solutions require consensus decisions, like those made inside managerial teams in companies; moreover, due to the importance of those decisions, the TC can be applied to professionals working in the supply chain field or related areas, from any industry that requires supply chain management. Including managers and directors among participants would enhance the desired results. On the other hand, in universities, the case can be applied to master’s degree students from management and industrial engineering programs since they already should have experience making decisions and are preparing to improve those skills.

The primary outcomes expected from the resolution of the TC are supply chain design decisions, inventory investment and allocation decisions, and supplier-related decisions. The desired results are action plans to enhance ESCR to minimise the effect of similar potential DEs that might occur in the future. Each participant team must present their plan, and after all groups have exposed their proposals, the instructor will coordinate a debriefing with the main findings and solutions.

For an organisation to achieve resilience, learning about ESCR is essential, and teaching cases like the one proposed in this work can enhance learning through real-life situations, forcing the readers to make decisions to solve the problems.

Keywords:

Knowledge management, enterprise, and supply chain resilience, disruptive events, decision-making, problem solution.