By Jorge Quezada, President SCMA, and Rachel Jones, VP of Student Affairs SCMA, MBA Class of 2012
On Friday, September 30th, members of the MBA Supply Chain Association (SCMA) took a trip to visit the Volvo Powertrain manufacturing facility in Hagerstown, MD. In this 1.5 million square feet facility, Volvo Powertrain designs and manufactures their D11, D13, and D16 engines for use in Volvo trucks. They also manufacture engines and transmissions for use in Mack trucks.
We were greeted by Mr. Curt Hassinger, Vice President of Key Accounts, who gave the group an overview of the global Volvo organization and Volvo Powertrain operations in Hagerstown. We were then able to meet with supply chain managers who spoke to us about the supply chain for the engine components within the manufacturing facility including forecasting methods and parts handling and replenishment initiatives. Finally we were given a guided tour of the manufacturing floor and the research and development facility.
The trip was a great success in exposing our membership to different functions within supply chain and we are very excited about the upcoming events.
The SCMA held its next member event, the SAP Simulation/Competition on Friday, October 28th. Over 30 of our members participated in the overview and SAP simulation game led by Paul Winkler of Penn State’s Applied Research Lab. Paul provided a detailed description of how SAP evolved and its popular applications in today’s businesses during the two hour overview. After lunch, we all headed to the computer lab to see how an SAP system works through the simulation game.
We conducted three rounds of the game in teams of two which required the participants to carefully monitor the price and inventory of several different flavors of bottled water in three different markets. We had to constantly change price and order additional inventory to make sure that our “business” was successful. Some of us fared better than others in this extremely fast paced game. Congratulations to our top three teams:
1st place: Tim Pace & Raghavan Parthasarathy
2nd place: Vivek Garg & Kyle Smith
3rd place: Mike Lang & Brett Fisher
The 2nd Annual SCMA SAP Competition proved to be a success again and our members look forward to next year’s event.