Analysis of a business game as learning tool for financial supply chain management

In times of crisis optimizing the use of available resources becomes essential. This has found an useful ally in the Financial Supply Chain Management and Supply Chain Finance solutions that, especially recently, have had a strong spread. The application of these solutions requires that the actors involved are able to use the various corporate levers available to decision-making and, above all, able to use them correctly and consistently with corporate strategies. This work aims to understand if it is possible to teach, to companies and their managers, to manage the physical and financial flows of a company through the use of IT tools, such as a software simulator. To this end, the software The Cool Connection has been analyzed. In particular, the focus was on data from the 2014/2015 Global Student Challenge, a global competition aimed at college students and held on the platform The Cool Connection. The analysis was divided into three parts. A first analysis concerned the overall performance of the groups in the competition in order to understand the strategies used and the relative performance levels. In a second step we analyzed the individual performance of individual roles in relation to the performance of the group. Finally, we analyzed the decision-making levers whose effects depend on more than one role, therefore the use of these in a coherent way by the participants in the competition has been analyzed in relation to the performance achieved.