Strategic Negotiations
The first part of this program focusses on strategic negotiations. Students will explore the following topics: Negotiation case, strategic decision making and human behavior, setting the stage for negotiations, managing constraints and trade-offs, managing hidden information, tactics, traps and pitfalls, and strategies for action and reaction. During this part, students familiarize themselves with basic strategic and psychological foundations of decision-making, get a better understanding of intercultural differences in a negotiation process, become familiar with basic quantitative assessment criteria in negotiations, and understand the role of a mediator.
After the lectures, students will be able to characterize the nature of a negotiation process, develop an individual systematic guideline to conduct a negotiation, moderate a negotiation between third parties, set the stage according to the nature of a negotiation, anticipate potential outcomes of a negotiation, adapt the strategy during a negotiation, and help other parties to prepare for a negotiation.
Finally, a transition is made to the topic supply chain management by looking at leadership as an essential dimension of successful management.
Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management deals with the alignment of customer demand on the one hand and with the ways to supply the requested products and services in an effective and efficient way on the other hand. The objective of this course is to familiarize students with some of the relevant choices that have to be made in order to achieve this alignment and the trade-offs present in each of those decisions. The course will be highly interactive and will contain a lot of intensive and fun teamwork.
On Days 1 and 2, we will be “exploring the fundamentals”, giving a short overview of the main principles and building blocks of the Supply Chain and working on those in detail. We will pay attention to differences between industry sectors and countries, thus making use of the diverse cultural and professional backgrounds of the students.
On Days 3 and 4, we will work on “mastering the fundamentals” with an integral activity centered around "The Fresh Connection", a business simulation game about a loss-making virtual company that needs to be rescued from disaster. Students will play in teams and take care of aligning demand and supply, in other words, decision making in the areas of sales, operations, supply chain and purchasing. Decisions will be implemented in the business simulation tool, so that the results can be seen after calculation. Since all teams play with exactly the same market circumstances, results between teams can be objectively compared, which gives a nice competitive touch to the activity.
On day 4 we will also spend some time on “imagining beyond the fundamentals”, by taking a look at potential impacts that some of the most relevant trends and developments in business and society might have on the supply chains of the future.
