In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly displacing and disrupting employee skill sets, it’s imperative to help current – and future – employees bridge the gap between the skills that AI demands and the skills they currently have. While corporations focus on reskilling their current workforces, educators around the world are hard at work developing and delivering courses to equip today’s students with the skills required to thrive in a world increasingly defined and driven by AI.
A recent World Economic Forum survey reported that cognitive skills, such as creative thinking, analytical thinking, and technology literacy, a type of critical thinking skill, are forecast to be the most sought-after employee skills by 2027.
Collaboration between academia and industry is essential to deliver these skills at speed to students. That’s why the SAP University Alliances program has been forging partnerships with educational institutions for 25 years, with more than 2,800 institutions currently working with SAP to educate tomorrow’s talent with SAP skills.
One of these partners is HEC Montréal, a prestigious, internationally recognized business school with a long history of creating innovative learning approaches to equip students with SAP skills.
Two decades ago, HEC Montréal pioneered ERPsim, a revolutionary and hugely successful educational tool immersing students in a real-life business scenario within SAP. Today, an estimated 30,000 students a year learn with ERPsim.
In an interview, Professor Pierre-Majorique Léger of HEC Montréal talked about the latest collaboration between HEC Montréal and SAP: Business Builders, the next generation of SAP gamified learning.
Business Builders: Game On with SAP Analytics Cloud
Business Builders is a gamified learning tool that can develop STEM skills and helps students sharpen their analytical, critical, and creative thinking skills using the SAP Analytics Cloud solution.
Professor Léger says educators are caught up in the generative AI tsunami and need to “rethink a new pedagogical approach for students to develop data analytics and data literacy skills while at the same time recognizing that ChatGPT, for example, makes it super easy for students to circumvent doing the tasks themselves.”
Business Builders is one solution to that problem.
The game can be played either face-to-face or in virtual teaching sessions, either synchronously in a single session or over several sessions.
Students find themselves in one of three scenarios in a fast-paced, competitive game with interactive, realistic learning scenarios. There is no chance of resorting to ChatGPT or a similar AI tool to win. Instead, students must demonstrate data-driven decision-making skills and apply visualization techniques to make informed decisions.
In each game, students take on roles such as marketing or product researcher, financial analyst, or supply chain analyst. Each game has multiple stages, with subsequent stages demanding greater skills and knowledge.
The stages comprise 10 business questions targeting different levels of skills and knowledge. The business questions are designed for students with little or no data analytics skills as well as those with more advanced data visualization and manipulation skills.
As part of the game, students use SAP Analytics Cloud to visually analyze the data and identify the best graphical representations to answer the questions.
Real-Life Problems with Realistic Data
The game uses vast synthetic data sets to make the business decision-making process as authentic as possible. “The notion of synthetic data is important,” Professor Léger explains, “because sometimes reality is too complex to bring into the classroom and does not serve the pedagogical process. Based on experience with ERPsim, creating a realistic synthetic data set that is as close as possible to reality is the best way to go.”
Business Builders currently offers three game scenarios offering a diverse range of real-life problems that students can solve using SAP Analytics Cloud: environmental, social, and governance; supply chain resilience; and international expansion.
According to HEC Montréal, the most-played scenario to date is supply chain resilience. This scenario involves a real-life problem where the Panama Canal gets shut down due to climate change, affecting the shipment of holiday gifts from Southeast Asia to the United States. Students are tasked with deciding how to reroute the containers and prioritize products to minimize the impact of this event.
A Win-Win for Students, Educators, and Employers
“It is the challenge of our generation of professors faced with generative AI to come up with a novel way to teach students about data analytics,” Professor Léger says. “We have found a way of using gamification to engage students in leveraging what they know about analytics and mathematics to become business builders. Using data to get insights and solving problems on the best technology that exists – SAP Analytics Cloud. And the best thing of all, it’s free for lecturers and their students around the world.”
To guide students through the game scenario questions and help optimize the learning experience, educators have access to tailor-made training materials. Instead of taking a hit-and-miss approach with the data and platform features, these tailor-made training materials help lecturers deepen the learning experience. Students can understand how insights are uncovered and how to make informed business decisions based on analysis of data sets and data visualizations.
SAP has also created a handbook about the basic concepts of data visualization and storytelling in SAP Analytics Cloud. Available in a slide-deck format, educators can refer to the theoretical aspects while students are getting hands-on practical experience in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Since its launch in July 2024, more than 300 educational institutions have registered for access to the Business Builders game and an anticipated 2,500 students will use SAP Analytics Cloud to compete with their peers in the game by the end 2024.
With technology accelerating at an ever-increasing speed, the good news is that educators can register and get up and running with Business Builders free of charge in a just matter of days. Find out how on the Business Builders website.