A seri­ous game, mod­el­ling a 6 month logis­tic sup­ply chain, saw 150 par­tic­i­pants togeth­er at the Sports Hall, Jan. 5, 2017. This was a marked exer­cise that enabled an oper­a­tional assess­ment of 28 stu­dents reg­is­tered in the UTC Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing course (UTC-GM), elec­tive spe­cial­ty Inte­grat­ed Pro­duc­tion & Logis­tics (GM-PIL).

 

“With my lec­tures at UTC, I use sev­er­al seri­ous games in the course of the year, but this is the first one that took a semes­ter to pre­pare and a full day to play out”, explains Joan­na Daaboul, lec­tur­er at the UTC Rober­val Lab­o­ra­to­ry, and whose ini­tia­tive this game was. Three writ­ten exer­cis­es in the semes­ter were devot­ed to prepar­ing the game. With a print­ed mar­ket descrip­tion, includ­ing sales records over 3 fis­cal years, the stu­dents were required to pre­dict the demand over the com­ing 6 months and elab­o­rate a con­tract pol­i­cy strat­e­gy with the sup­pli­ers, also includ­ing with stock man­age­ment, pro­duc­tion lines, dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works, price set­ting, trans­porta­tion and human resources needs, num­ber of pro­duc­tion sites and store out­lets. The loca­tion of the fac­to­ries and store­hous­es was deter­mined on a floor map of the sports hall, repro­duc­ing trans­porta­tion issues, to scale. “Nor­mal­ly the res­o­lu­tion of these kinds of prob­lem call for algo­rith­mic work and cal­cu­la­tions often seen as tedious and even dif­fi­cult, but in this game envi­ron­ment, the stu­dents showed aston­ish­ing moti­va­tion and and inter­est despite the vast amount of work need­ed”, adds our lec­tur­er, a spe­cial­ist in indus­tri­al engineering. 

From the suppliers to the customers

All the steps, run­ning from raw mate­r­i­al pro­cure­ment through to sales of the fin­ished prod­ucts to end cus­tomers are rep­re­sent­ed. The prod­uct here is sim­ple – a flower set in a can­dle, where each team tries to low­er costs and deliv­ery dates while propos­ing a range of colours for poten­tial cus­tomers’ prod­uct choic­es. Mov­ing bas­kets rep­re­sents the trans­porta­tion phas­es. The role of the sup­pli­ers is occu­pied by the ‘oppo­site team’, which tends to make the nego­ti­a­tions hard­er. Then, a total 90 UTC stu­dents, aca­d­e­m­ic, ‘admin’ and sup­port staff came in to act as clients (for free). They each picked a card from a deck, indi­cat­ing var­i­ous lev­els of expec­ta­tion in terms of aspect, speed or order han­dling … to repro­duce the vari­ety and evo­lu­tion of demand side. At reg­u­lar inter­vals the stu­dents’ per­for­mances were assessed lead­ing to a real-time eval­u­a­tion of a month’s activ­i­ties. To fin­ish, we con­clud­ed that the first edi­tion of this game was a friend­ly and ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful event. The ‘win­ners’ were award­ed the mark of 18/20, well in excess of the professor’s expec­ta­tions. “We def­i­nite­ly want to do this again, in Decem­ber 2017, with a seri­ous game on Xmas dec­o­ra­tions, thus com­bin­ing the seri­ous­ness of the work with a sea­son­al plea­sure”, adds Joan­na Daaboul.