ColPMan: A Serious Game for Practicing Collaborative Production Management

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a serious game, named ColPMan, which enables practitioners, undergraduate students, and graduate students in the industrial engineering and management fields to experientially learn dynamic decision-making skills for collaborative production management in a large-scale make-to-order company. In ColPMan, a team of players collaboratively operates the virtual in-house supply chain of a manufacturer, in order to maximize profit (i.e., game score). The supply chain is composed of a headquarters that accepts orders from customers, an upstream factory producing materials, and three downstream factories processing materials into products. Each player is assigned to one of the sites and makes production and delivery plans for that site. Since the operations of different sites within the chain are related to one another, the players need to learn to develop a shared strategy and act in a coordinated way with regard to various environmental disturbances in order to obtain a high score. The developed game has been tested in an undergraduate classroom exercise, with a positive response from students.