Students steer a $3.4B ERP program from the executive suite.
Student executive teams take seats at Granville Industrial Corporation, a fictional Fortune 100 industrial multinational, and steer a decade-long $3.4 billion enterprise logistics transformation. Across ten rounds spanning 2004 to 2014, teams face more than twenty decisions. Five of them decide whether the program delivers working capability or repeats the failure patterns seen in real transformations. Six AI advisors help teams think each decision through, and the final call stays with the team.
MIS students can name the failure patterns. Then they repeat them.
MIS students can name the failure patterns: governance breakdowns, scope creep, vendor management problems, and continuing a program because of what's already been spent. They can describe the famous disasters. Then, as executives, many repeat the same mistakes, because knowing the patterns is different from making the calls when the facts are unclear.
In Flexee ERP, students make those calls. Granville Industrial Corporation has eight autonomous business units, a named executive team, documented vendor relationships, and a program history spanning a decade, with detailed numbers at every stage. Each student takes an executive seat (CEO, CFO, CIO, or Program Director) and sees a different part of the same situation. Teams succeed or fail on how well they share information across roles.
The information is messy on purpose. Students weigh sources of varying reliability, including internal audit, vendor communications, board signals, and advisory firms with commercial interests. They learn to read what people say, what they leave out, and why.
Three design choices set it apart.
Scenario depth.
Granville Industrial Corp. has eight autonomous business units, a named executive team, documented vendor relationships, and a decade of program history with detailed numbers at every stage. Students work inside a full, multi-year company.
Information split across roles.
Each student sits in a specific executive seat and gets a different part of the same situation. Teams succeed or fail on how well they share information across roles, and they learn to spot patterns by coordinating in real time.
Cost that only degrades.
In the four-part scoring, Cost Performance can only get worse, never recover, because committed spending can't be undone. Teams learn that cost decisions in an enterprise transformation are one-way doors.
Success measured across the whole program.
Teams are scored on four dimensions that together decide whether an enterprise IT transformation succeeds. No single dimension gives the full picture.
Each role sees the situation differently.
Each student takes a specific executive seat, and each seat gets its own part of the information. Teams learn to coordinate and share information by doing it, the way executive teams do.
Ten rounds. One semester.
Ten rounds across a semester.
The 10 rounds run across a semester. The best class size is 20 to 40 students in teams of 4 to 6, with each student holding one of the four executive roles. Faculty get a full teaching note along with the simulation platform.
Paired with The Phoenix Project.
Flexee ERP is paired with Gene Kim's The Phoenix Project as required reading. The book gives students the shared narrative and technical vocabulary of modern IT transformation. The simulation makes them practice what the book describes.
The company is fictional. The decision dynamics are not.
Flexee ERP draws on a decade of research into documented enterprise IT failures. Every decision point and consequence is tied to evidence from RAND Corporation analysis, federal oversight reports, independent post-mortems, and investigative reporting on major ERP disasters of the 2000s and 2010s. Students face the same kinds of decisions that produced those disasters, and often make the same mistakes.
See if Flexee ERP fits your graduate MIS or IT strategy course.
Flexee ERP is in use today in graduate MIS programs focused on enterprise IT, project governance, and executive decision-making. Talk to Chuck about how Granville Industrial Corporation would fit your course.