Reengineering the Teaching of SAP SCM – How to Make Students Understand What They are Clicking in Supply Network Planning

Training in enterprise systems, such as SAP ERP and SAP SCM, typically follows a workflow-oriented approach. Students are taught which specific actions to take in which sequence in order to achieve a certain result, such as completing a business process. The main reason for this low-level, step-by-step approach is that the support offered by SAP, i.e. the training and documentation provided, is workflow-oriented. While most students succeed in completing the clickstream, they lack a deeper understanding of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Another problem is that very powerful algorithms are just encapsulated in a mouse click, so students are left unaware of the internal complexity of the matter. We focus on these two problems, discussing them with the help of two approaches to supply network planning that are available in SAP SCM – the SNP heuristic and optimization. The issues and findings presented in this paper are based on experience teaching enterprise resource planning and supply chain management courses, using SAP software for practical sessions.