Experiencing the Role of Cooperation and Competition in Operations and Supply Chain Management with a Multiplayer Serious Game

Exploratory Research on Adaptability and Flexibility of a Serious Game in Operations and Supply Chain Management

“…With appropriate design, SGs can provide a meaningful experience with the subject matter, even if post-game reflection, and possibly a supervised one, is required to translate this experience into effective learning outcomes. As [9] reports, games can encourage and sustain the learning of both academic and non-academic skills, and especially soft skills, by promoting intrinsic motivation, motivating learners to collaborate and share information effectively.…”

“…To accomplish this mission, the player must deal with a variety of entrepreneurial challenges, such as: customer relations, workforce and resources acquisition, and capacity management. Finally, Practice operations [9] is a single-player 3D SG that challenges the player with the managing of a clothing company plant. To achieve success, the player must deal with different roles and tasks, such as placing and winning bids, managing procurement and resources, transforming raw materials in end products, and organizing outbound shipping to final customers.…”

“…As it emerges, while the game is running, players must face and, possibly, solve operational and daily issues, ranging from the supplier management to the production scheduling, to the customer demand management as well. A typical flow of activities is described in [9] and it is limited to the Make-To-Order (MTO) logic, where the SM places offers to existing customer requests and, when an offer is accepted by a customer, production planning is triggered. The OM then receives the offer details and tries to plan production, according to the bill of materials and quality levels of the offered product.…”

“…SGs in engineering education are not a recent topic: SG have already been proposed and implemented in engineering education more than 50 years ago [3], [4], although they have not always been taken very seriously, especially in the first years [5]. More recently, thanks to the rise of non-traditional labs and lab networks [6], [7], and to the improvements in distance learning and online services for education [8], SGs have seen a new wave of interest as they are more and more perceived as immersive and entertaining learning tools [9]. This reconsideration is also accelerated by the fact that many teachers consider learning by doing as an effective teaching style to close the gap between theory and practice [10], and SGs give learners the opportunity to explore and understand a simulated context by reflecting everyday practical processes, without exposing learners to most the risks that these processes include [11].…”

Servitization for Teaching and Research Laboratories

“…The serious game has been developed to convey practical notions of operations and supply chain management to fill the gap between the theoretical knowledge learned by students during classes and the practical skills required by companies. Moreover, by creating a web-based game with different companies acting in the same universe, the game aims at boosting critical thinking, problem solving, enjoinment, and collaboration skills [42]. Full details of the game are described in [43], where game parameters are fully reported, and the impact of difficulty levels on players' results is preliminarily investigated.…”