www.howest.be

Gaming in ERP

How we’re educating geeks

Confenis 2012, Ghent, September 20th, 2012

1

Beerland Ilse

Vandenbossche Pieter-Jan

2

Bruges

Kortrijk

Hogeschool Gent

13.200 studenten

Universiteit Gent

25.000 studenten

3

nMCT Devine DAE TI OM

IT-related bachelors at Howest

BPM in bachelors:

Profile of IT-students

4

• High level of technical skills

• Focus on solving problems

on a case by case basis

• Using technology they know

• Are not interested in

business economics

• Poor communication skills

Profile of IT-students

5

Need

Need

Need

Solution

Solution

Solution

Coding

Coding

Coding

But standalone applications… … are getting integrated

Pure coding jobs…

7

Source: Worldwide wages of a jr. software developer by payscale.com

…can be outsourced

Future IT-professionals

8

• Technical skills

• Communication skills

• Business proces understanding

Developing integrated solutions that satisfy

business needs

9

INPUT OUTPUT

Course: Business Process Management

10

Step 0

• Traditional approach

Students can reproduce some course material

but do they understand Business processes?

11

Step 1

• Introducing MS Dynamics NAV in courses

• Case studies

• Final presentation for a professional jury

A first step is made, but students still have

problems to see the entire process

These lessons are useless for us IT-students

ERP software is only used by multinationals

Isn’t there a way to teach this more interactively

This course does not fit our curriculum

13

How to get IT-students interested in

Business Process Management (BPM) ?

• Real-life case studies

• Software used in business

• Serious game

Business Process Game

14

Analysis of existing business games

15

• A lot of games focus on management skills,

while we’re looking for a process approach

• Most games deal with a wide variety of

processes, but none of them digging deep

• Some games are focussed on gameplay

while the educational value stays low

Analysis of existing business games

16

Step 2

• Business game in the BPM-courses

17

Step 2

• Business game in the BPM-courses

Students experience basic business processes

• Then we register these business processes in

real ERP-software

And do students like BPM now?

NO!

YES!

But are their BPM-skills improved?

Are they aware of it’s importance?

20

Step 3: towards an ERP-business game…

• To avoid click-by-click exercises

• To combine the experience of a game with

the efficiency of ERP

• To increase the content-level

So we’re creating a new game

21

• Which is playable in ERP-software

• Using the standard business logic

• And inserted a gaming layer to the existing

software

How does it work?

22

Conclusion

23

• Teaching BPM to IT-students is not mission

impossible

But..

• it asks for a different approach

• it’s time consuming

• and always work in progress

University Contacts

• ilse.beerland@howest.be

• pieter-jan.vandenbossche@howest.be

Howest – Campus GKG

Head of department: Roel Vandommele

Graaf K. de Goedelaan 5 – 8500 Kortrijk

056 24 12 11

056 24 12 24

www.howest.be

www.nmct.be