APICS SWIV | Education

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Who can benefit from the APICS CSCP Program?

The CSCP designation is for professionals who are interested in increasing their knowledge and expertise in the field of supply chain management. This designation is ideal for you and your organization if you are

Interested in more depth of knowledge and understanding in the areas of supplier and customer relations, international trade, the use of information technology to enable the supply chain, and physical logistics
A professional who is consulting or teaching supply chain functions
Employed in the field of supply chain management
Working with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
An employer wanting to create a common standard of understanding, vocabulary, resources, and frameworks within your company to address your supply chain challenges and opportunities.
An employer or manager wanting to create a common standard of competency across your organization
A CPIM needing certification maintenance points. Earn 50+ professional development points toward CPIM certification maintenance through the Learning System and APICS CSCP certification exam.

CSCP will help you advance your career while giving you the foundation to improve your company's competitive position and profitability.

The course was very informative and challenging. I work in Distribution and I thought I knew a lot about my industry, but I was very surprised at the depth Supply Chain encompasses. This course has opened my eyes to my surroundings and inspired me to take future certification courses for personal knowledge and career advancement.
- Cardinal Brands

Course components
The APICS CSCP Learning System is a comprehensive professional development and exam preparation program. It combines print materials that cover the entire CSCP body of knowledge with interactive online tools. Both the self-directed and instructor-led delivery formats use the APICS CSCP Learning System as their foundation materials.

Print components
The APICS CSCP Learning System contains four print modules offering more than 800 pages of material. The following is a brief overview of what you will learn.

Module 1: Supply Chain Management Fundamentals

Understand how successful supply chain management adds value to your organization
Learn how to develop a supply chain strategy that aligns with corporate strategy

Module 2: Building Competitive Operations, Planning, and Logistics

Understand natural dynamics within the supply chain to optimize performance and profitability
Evaluate the process constraints and choices within global logistics to establish a plan linked to overall strategy

Module 3: Managing Customer and Supplier Relationships

Effectively use customer data to improve service performance and increase value to suppliers and customers
Understand the strategic importance of purchasing and supplier relationships

Module 4: Using Information Technology to Enable Supply Chain Management

Understand the innovative technologies enabling collaborative commerce and global visibility
Apply technology to enhance performance of distribution, reverse logistics, and global supply chain communications
Each section lists learning objectives, and progress check questions are provided throughout the text.

Online components
The online tools help you determine your initial level of knowledge, create a study plan based on your individual needs, reinforce your studies with practice tests, and track your learning progress through progress reports. The online portion of the course consists of the following components.

Overview
The overview will guide you through the APICS CSCP Learning System.
Pre- and post-tests
These practice tests, consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions each, cover content drawn from the entire system. After each question, you will be provided with immediate feedback, including the correct answer and the rationale for that answer. A running total of questions answered correctly is provided as you proceed through the test. The pre-test results will provide you with an indication of those areas that require the most attention. The post-test results will measure your progress following your completion of the course.
Module-specific tests
Functioning similarly to the pre- and post-tests, the module-specific tests allow you to check your understanding and retention of materials within a given module. The questions include immediate feedback, answer rationales, and reference to the relevant sections in the text so you can review trouble areas.
Online glossary
Accessible any time during the program, the pop-up glossary allows you to look up definitions of terms without leaving your current activity.
eFlashcards
These flashcards will supplement your exam practice sessions by testing your knowledge using an interactive drill-and-practice format.
Online Information Center
Access to updates, related links, and test taking tips. Also provides additional reference and feedback opportunities.
Reports
Individuals and/or managers can track course progress and document the learning gain through a complimentary reporting feature that includes pre- and post-test scores and module-specific test scores.

A test-timing feature is available on all tests. It measures the elapsed time and assesses whether you are on track to complete the CSCP exam in the allotted time.

APICS CSCP access codes for the APICS CSCP online component are valid for 12 months from the date of initial online enrollment. The access code is granted to the original purchaser only as a Limited License and grants that user a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable personal license to access and use www.learncscp.com web site and its content for the user's personal, non-commercial use only.

APICS Lean Enterprise Workshop Series

As more organizations decide to go lean, demand is escalating for a skilled team and systemwide approach for developing and implementing lean project plans. This course is designed to equip you with the broad knowledge and tools to map the transformation for developing a lean culture at your organization. This workshop will allow you to

Complete a self-assessment to determine your organization's readiness to implement lean
Gain practical experience analyzing how to incorporate lean into organizations
Leave with a project plan for implementing lean into your organization

The APICS Lean Enterprise Workshop Series is organized to enable you to approach and understand the lean transformation process systematically. Using scenarios from a fictitious company, Murphy's Toys, you will be tasked with finding lean solutions to a myriad of challenges. This method will provide you with the flexibility to immediately customize what you've learned and implement it at your own organization.

There are seven workshops in the series:

Introduction
You will gain an overview of the many components of implementing a lean transformation in your organization and gauge your organization's readiness through a hands-on assessment.

Lean Culture
Explore the effects of a lean implementation on your employees and learn about the importance of teams. The Kaizen, a team- oriented continuous improvement event will be introduced in this section.

Value Stream Mapping
Learn about value stream mapping and this tool's value for viewing processes and determining potential areas of improvement. Draw a current state map and then learn about concepts to help you improve your future state.

Stability and Process Improvements
Learn how to improve process stability, achieve demand stability and improve manufacturing process efficiencies.

Just-in-Time
Determine customer demand, standard work, line balancing and many other tools to meet customer demand. Participants will explore the use of a heijunka system to meet customer demand through a hands-on activity.

Measuring
Review the way a lean company measures and align measurements with objectives. Topics include lean accounting, inventory costs, target costs and lead time.

Sustaining
Learn about the long-term changes to sustain the gains made. Topics include lean design, analyzing failures and ensuring ongoing quality control and continuous improvement.

CPIM Testing

Testing and registration take place at a Pearson VUE site. Plan ahead and reserve in advance – Pearson VUE testing sites have a finite number of seats for each day the tests are offered. These are the locations of a Pearson VUE site:

Salem
Salem Pearson Professional Centers
VA Outpatient Clinic Bldg
1660 Oak St SE
Suite 250 Salem , OR 97301

Beaverton
Beaverton Pearson Prof Ctr
10700 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Hwy Park Plaza W Bldg 3
Suite 595 Beaverton , OR 97005

Medford
Medford Pearson Prof. Ctr
3560 Excel Drive / Suite 105
Medford , OR 97504

The best way to register for a test is to contact Pearson VUE by phone at 1-800-274-8399. If you are an APICS member keep your member number handy and be sure to get your discount.

If you would like to register for the test via their website, be warned that others have found the experience to be very frustrating and possible case-study in poor web design. The phone method is more straightforward. If you would like to arrange to take a test at the same time as others, you can do so by agreeing on a test time and getting registered individually. If you are thinking of this as an option, you should probably be prepared to arrange this further in advance to make sure all of you can reserve a seat.

As an on-going note: APICS-SWIV will not be offering paper/pencil tests for the foreseeable future. Other options for testing include any of the testing sites around the country where Pearson VUE operates (check with Pearson VUE for locations and availability).

Please call 1-800-274-8399 or visit the APICS portion of Pearson VUE

Methods for Taking An APICS CPIM Course - by Joel Butler

One Method For Taking An APICS CPIM Course

I would not want to claim or even have it seem like I am saying “I have found the right way to take an APICS CPIM course” – there are, of course, many paths. Still, I took five courses and was able to pass five exams without a retake, so some part of my own method may work for you.

Certainly, you would want to consider how much time you have and the manner in which you have had best success in past coursework – consider and proceed along those lines. This reminds me of what I consider to be an example of someone who used what I think to be a very different method of learning – this is a very smart friend (with advanced degrees in physics) who told me that he could never figure out why people bothered to take notes in his college classes. He was wondering why they would take any attention away from the teacher just to write something down!

I think the best way to describe my approach to CPIM courses is to outline the cycle of activities week-to-week:

I would begin my weekly work on the weekend by reviewing the previous chapter material (skimming really) and answering the ten questions.
Next I would read the Participant Guide chapter for the next week. Mostly I read the text material, not paying much attention to the PowerPoint illustrations.
If there were exercises within the section for the following week, I would try to work out those, in pencil.
Following the reading of the Participant Guide I would move on to any reading assigned from the text. I always found this a little tougher, but tried to be mindful of my uptake or comprehension.
In the Participant reading and the Text reading I took note of what didn’t make sense to me for later use.
I tried to complete the above steps on the weekend – evenings after work were a bit harder to do even though we are talking about three hours total.
I tried to make sure I was rested and relaxed on class day. Mostly, it helped to try and not schedule a long day at work and to leave a bit earlier, even by a half-hour. By trying to do this, I feel like I was better able to stay with the instructor and the class for the entire three hours (or the better part of it).
In class, I was ready-to-go on the question review during which I paid special attention to those that I got wrong: this is one of the clues to passing the CPIM exams – learn how APICS structure their test questions (even if it doesn’t always make perfect sense).
During class I tried to make the most out of what was happening – staying engaged with the instructor, listening to comments by other students and, yeah, telling the occasional personal story. I also brought up the questions I had noted in my preview reading.

Again, the above is a weekly cycle. Inside and outside of class, I wrote all over the guide and the text. And after each class, I was not, myself, in a hurry to do more until the weekend, but I could also see the benefit of someone jumping back into it quickly to see how you can do on the new questions (while the info is fresh).

There you have it – my method of preparing and taking an APICS course. I hope you have gotten something out of it, but if you have additional ideas that have helped you, send them along to me and maybe we can share a collection of other useful ideas.

One Method For CPIM Exam Preparation

To follow-up on my article of the method I used for taking an APICS CPIM review course, I thought it might be as useful share my method for preparing for a CPIM exam. It needs to be said, that I don’t have the single magic formula for this as there are probably as many good ways to prepare for these exams as there are people taking them. Just the same, I took and passed five exams with respectable scores (average of about 315 or so), so some part of my own method may work for you as well.

First, it needs to be said that I like to organize things and avoid procrastination. I usually do end up doing some procrastination, but if I organize myself to follow a fixed pattern then I usually do OK if I can do 75% of what I set out for myself.

Next, I have to say that my method depends on a lot of re-reading of the material and after-the-course note-taking. For me, taking notes “sets” the learning better. I have to admit, it wasn’t enough to just write things down as I could go into robotic note-taking mode. I should qualify and say that my method depends on reading for comprehension and note-taking from that basis.

The basic structure I used was to sign-up for an exam and start studying two weeks before the exam date. In those two weeks here is the cycle of work that I tried to do on a daily basis (for about one to two hours each day)

Read a section of the Participant Guide and the associated readings from the text, and as I said, taking notes from those readings. I would also re-work the exercises.
Read over my notes and then re-take the end-of-section questions from the Participant Guide. Having noted the correct answers in class gave me the ability to see how well I did. I then paid extra attention to the questions I missed on this second go-round (maybe it’s not a surprise, but I often missed on the same questions that threw me the first time).

I repeated steps 1 and 2 until I finished all the sections of the course – now I had a big set of notes that I could refer to for really condensed studying. Next up was taking the exam that came on the CD-ROM (which came with the Participant Guide). Here is the next cycle:

The APICS CPIM Exam Content Guide is very useful as it shows the breakdown of topics for each course and also includes a glossary and some questions. I would go through each of the words in the glossary for the particular test I was studying for. If I wasn’t really sure I understood the term, I would go to the dictionary and learn it like I was in a spelling bee – plus I tried to give it some context from within the coursework.
Now I would take the CD-ROM exam, noting which questions were missed
Going back over the missed questions and reviewing notes from the course materials prepared me for…
Go back to the CD-ROM and re-take the exam. Now, here you’ll either find that you’ll correct the ones you got wrong or get some new questions wrong. I pretty much kept at this cycle of re-studying and re-taking the exam until I got just a few questions wrong. The trick here when re-taking the test is to “not remember” the right answers but to always give the best answer based on your understanding.

That is about it – I know it is pretty methodical, but I always wanted to just take the exam and put the process behind me once and for all (and I do mean once!).

One Method For Taking The CPIM Exam

If there aren’t a bunch of books on how to take standardized tests (like the CPIM exams) then there ought to be. I am aware that test-taking strategies are not a substitute for poor preparation, but they can help one make the most out of what preparation you have done. What follows is a quick summary of what I did and I am convinced it helped me pass five exams (with no re-takes). I was motivated by getting the exam behind me and also by my cheapness.

There are some basic test taking practices – get plenty of rest the night before, set up your personal schedule in advance, make appropriate logistic arrangements, eat enough beforehand to get you through the exam comfortably, dress for a variety of temperature conditions and organize your materials (pencils, calculators) the night before. These basics seem like common sense, but I think they might be easily forgotten – do take care of the basics!

The exams I took did not have a penalty for guessing so that is strategy number one: answer every single question, even if you have to guess. Strategy number two follows on that and recognizes that these exams are multiple-choice – don’t guess until you have eliminated as many wrong answers as you can (your odds greatly improve with every wrong answer you eliminate).

Each question on the APICS test has two elements worthy of some discussion. First there is the question itself and then there is the multiple-choice portion.

The questions can be worded in such a way as to trick those who are rushing through the test. They may bury a little word like “not” or “isn’t” into the question which changes the meaning – miss these little words and you’ll probably select the right answer for the wrong question (it’s no surprise that this ‘right’ answer is sitting there, just waiting for you). The point here is to read all of each question and make sure you understand the precise meaning of it before moving onto look at the multiple-choice portion.

Now we come to the four multiple-choices. The people who create these tests are called psychometricians and, boy, they must have some good, evil laughs when they come up with these answer sets. Personally, I found that among the four answers you can:

Eliminate one right off the bat as just plain stupid or wrong
Eliminate another one with some extra effort (careful reading of the question)

Then you might find yourself left with two that seem pretty close to being correct. When I had this happen I found that by going back to the question, I was often able to find some nuance in the wording that made one of the remaining answers more right.

Even when I was able to quickly spot a question's answer, I took a brief look at the wrong ones to make sure I wasn’t being led down the path.

I worked my way through the test from beginning to end and took full advantage of the time allowed. My method was to first answer the questions I knew were right, skipping all of the others. Then I would return and work on the ones I skipped – putting a little more work into them, but again skipping those that were giving me a problem. By going through the test in this fashion I found I didn’t get discouraged by over-working something difficult and that I could often get a clue about how to answer a skipped question figuring out or reading another. In the final passes, I was able to better judge how much time I could spend on the remaining questions because I knew how many there were.

Eventually, as time wore on, I was left with the ones where I wasn’t really able to come up with the best answer, but keeping in mind strategy #1 and strategy #2 I made sure I came up with my best guess by eliminating the bad answers I could. I was really hoping that I could always be at the point where I was able to pass the test on what I knew and then by careful guessing just add to my score.

Finally, I went over each question, beginning to end, just to make sure I didn’t make a dumb mistake like marking the wrong selection (picking “C” when I really meant to pick “B”). At this point I wasn’t trying to second-guess myself, but just make sure I was being careful.

Like most of the other methods I’ve written about, this one takes a little bit longer – I was often the last guy in the exam room and someone even commented that I took longer than they had ever seen. But I was motivated to make each exam session my last exam session for that particular test. Good luck on your exams!

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