Game—The Online Wood Supply Game

Abstract

This paper describes the Wood Supply Game (WSG), a prize-winning e-learning tool that is freely available for players all over the world. The game effectively helps students and managers realize the challenges in managing demand and supply in wood supply chains, and gain insight into the types of measures required to make these divergent chains effective. The WSG is an adaptation of the Beer game, a popular didactic tool used to empirically demonstrate demand amplification in a simple and generic context. The supply chain modeled by the Beer game does not involve co-products, and thus is very different from the wood supply chain, which is divergent by nature. The WSG presented in this paper models a supply network with one point of divergence and demand for two products. This preserves the simplicity of the game but enables it to offer a base for supply network simulation in a large number of industrial sectors with divergent processes. We describe an online version of the WSG, discuss our experiences playing it with students and managers, and provide hints to the instructor.