Lanner & Shandong University: 10 Years of Simulation Success

Lanner today celebrates a 10 year relationship with Shandong University, one of the largest universities in China. Shandong’s School of Management adopted Lanner’s WITNESS simulation platform in 2005 as part of its strategic teaching and research programme.

Shandong's curriculum is aimed at cultivating innovative cross-discipline management talent specifically across strategic planning and operations management. Supported by a cutting edge laboratory that includes a miniature factory, and a computing environment encompassing ERP, CRM and simulation, which provides students with an interactive business operation experimental environment.

The partnership was established in order to support best practice and help raise standards as part of China’s national '211' and '985' projects, initiatives designed to raise the research standards of high-level universities. The '985' project in particular involved both national and local governments allocating large amounts of funding to 39 prestigious universities in order to build new research centres, improve facilities, hold international conferences, attract world-renowned faculty and visiting scholars, and help Chinese faculty leaders attend conferences abroad.

With over 200 student users across a number of courses, WITNESS is helping, not only to support the university’s goals as part of its commitment to projects '211' and '985', but to collaborate with local companies to suggest new approaches to boosting performance.

Since working with Lanner, the university has gained a number of accolades. The success of the School of Management was strongly endorsed in 2007 gaining approval as “Construction Unit of National Management Discipline Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center”; and again in 2012, passing the acceptance check of experts of the Ministry of Education. The centre became the “State-level Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center”; in 2014, and it was again approved as “State-level Management Discipline Virtual Simulation Experimental Teaching Center”.

“Simulation is integral to achieving operational excellence and optimising performance, therefore adopting simulation within universities is a fundamental means of raising standards and fostering best practice to ensure tomorrow’s workforce is equipped with the very best planning capabilities,” comments Geoff Hook, Projects Director, Lanner. “Lanner works with hundreds of universities worldwide including more than 50 a number in China, including Dalian, Wuhan, Tianjin and Tsinghua, and it is a privilege to celebrate 10 years of working successfully with Shandong. We look forward to developing this partnership further over the coming years.”

“Simulation based predictive analytics forms a fundamental part of our School of Management, allowing students to learn management theories and practices in a virtual environment in order to fully understand, experience and practice innovative new approaches,” comments Xiangwei Zhang, Shandong University. “Through using WITNESS we can reproduce the past, replicate the present and predict the future, therefore we are able to utilise this superior insight to drive greater innovation across our teaching and management practices, and instil best practice across the university.”