I could have titled this post, "Procuring Supply Chain Management E-learning", as both plays on words describe the situation I was in a few weeks ago, when looking for a range of blended learning resources to provide a large corporate purchasing department with some foundation training.
As soon as I heard the words "procurement and purchasing", I immediately thought "supply chain management", as surely the two are related (?) and refreshed my memory of the courses on offer from the two major e-learning suppliers who have content in this area, CrossKnowledge and SkillSoft.
But being very aware of the sensitivities about job and function titles I probed further and realised that a procurement professional wouldn't necessarily appreciate this general labelling and that I needed to dig deeper. My search took me to Canada and then back to Ireland, to two companies - Automated Learning and their partner, The Leading Edge Group - who together offer a good niche solution.
In addition to a four-module programme on the "Principles of Purchasing", they also have a corresponding suite, "Principles of Supply Chain" and, for a slightly more advanced audience, a programme entitled, "Strategic Sourcing", plus another set on "Inventory Management". If you were looking for content for a corporate university's SCM/purchasing school, then you'd have a ready-made solution here.
What I particularly like about this solution is it's organisation. Each of the suites is built around the same structure, the same look and feel and therefore, for someone who is building a curriculum, it looks good to the learner. The content was sound too. Although not directly based on any specific standards, I undertook a rudimentary mapping to some of the international purchasing and supply chain bodies of knowledge and found a lot of similarity. Like all good e-learning, these titles would provide a solid foundation of knowledge on which to build with other forms of learning intervention. Whilst some of the modules have the usual pre- and post-testing to measure knowledge gain, others have so-called mentored exercises built in, which is where The Leading Edge Group can provide tutorial support.
As a final note, I also wondered what was out there in the way of on-line simulations. My searches kept coming back to the same solution from Enspire Learning, which has been adopted by a number of different organisations as their SCM simulation of choice, including Harvard Business School Publishing - Global Supply Chain Management Simulation TM. I'll write some more about simulations another time, as it's an area I will be coming back to, but for now, I did like this one, as sometimes I find they can be frustratingly complex to get into, but I got the hang of this one quite quickly!
As always, if you know of any other solutions in these subject areas, then don't hesitate to post a comment!
