Evaluation of the Impact of Learning Labs on Inventory Control - An Experimental Approach with a Collaborative Simulation Game of a Production Network

Inventory oscillations lead to instabilities in supply chains causing boom & bust cycles and overshoot & collapse. Inventory oscillations, also known as the Bullwhip Effect, are thought to gain in intensity with the globalization of the economy. The study examines how learning laboratories could affect the rationally-bounded decisions of schedulers with respect to the task of inventory control in supply networks. The approach is grounded in the theories of systems thinking and learning organization. The learning lab offers learning opportunities at the individual, organizational and interorganizational level and identifies six decisional patterns of inventory control. A new behavioral cause of the bullwhip effect is recognized to be counterintuitive decision making, which produces what it is thought to lessen namely the bullwhip effect. A countermeasure to this effect is the integration of the production plans to the entire production load of the network through collaborative learning.