Bridging the knowing-doing gap in global supply chain education

Abstract

Streamlining the operation of the extended global supply chain is challenging since it involves a multitude of information systems and companies in several countries. Academia partly fails to fulfill the demand for candidates with the knowledge and skills for executing international business transactions. Consequently, we lack candidates who can translate theory into actions, thereby creating a knowledge-doing gap. This paper contributes to bridging this gap by introducing a new learning activity: the global supply chain learning activity denoted as the GSC-Activity. The GSC-Activity lets students execute export and import transactions in an international business-to-business environment involving several companies while handling both the inter-company order flow and the internal order management cycles at each company using their ERP system. This provides student with deep exposure to the information flow along the chain and experience in executing export and import processes of each company. We provide a workable example of the GSC-Activity with a case study repeated over several semesters involving students from Australia and Norway.