Kinaxis Supply Chain Game
An educational simulation powered by Kinaxis RapidResponse.
What is the Kinaxis Supply Chain Game?
The Kinaxis Supply Chain Game is an educational simulation powered by Kinaxis RapidResponse, and designed to introduce students to supply chain planning and why concurrency matters. The premise of the game: order cookies to fulfill customer demand. All the students will be assigned to teams – within each team, there will be four nodes: Retail, Wholesale, Distribution, and Production. Every node will incur cost for excess inventory and retail will accumulate additional cost for any unmet customer demand. The simulation is run in two modes: standard and concurrent.
Gain experience
Capture the fundamental experience of a supply chain planner..
Concurrent planning
Understand the importance of real-time transparency, data, and communication in concurrent planning.
Impact of supply chain decisions
Realize the impact supply chain decisions make on financial performance.
Change management
Discuss change management practices in implementing new technologies.
FAQs
For those of you that know the Beer Game, the Kinaxis Supply Chain Game might sound familiar. It’s not. The Kinaxis Supply Chain Game challenges students to collaborate and make supply chain decisions by using the capabilities of concurrent planning. Students will have visibility to real-time data.
Each team will compete to win by managing cost: the team with the lowest cost wins the game. Team scores will be shared in a live leaderboard. Instructors will use multiple rounds of supply chain simulation to help students experience the impact of their team’s decisions and formulate strategies based on applied learnings.
The instructor will be provided with graphs that summarize each team’s performance. These graphs empower the instructors to provide detailed instruction on effective supply planning practices.
Reduced visibility, communication gaps, and siloed information can no longer address supply chain issues. Concurrent supply chain planning is the continuous re-balancing of plans to reflect what’s happening in the real world. Teams instantly know the business impact of change. It's the complete real-time synchronization of all people, processes, and data across the supply chain.
Game requirements.
The Kinaxis Supply Chain Game is aligned to modern teaching methods and can be played in person, virtually, or in a hybrid classroom environment. We strongly recommend an in-person environment for the best learning outcomes. For hybrid and virtual, faculty instructor will need to assign students to breakout rooms.
We recommend a minimum of 90 minutes to cover instructions, game play (standard & concurrent mode), and discussion questions.
The Kinaxis Supply Chain Game can be played with 4 –24 user IDs. We recommend having students play the game in groups so the game can accommodate class sizes up to 60. Students will be assigned to teams of four. Each team has four nodes in the supply chain: Production, Distribution, Wholesale, and Retail. In cases where the number of users is not evenly divisible by four, we recommend multiple students play together on a single node.
All groups will need an internet connection and a laptop or desktop computer with internet browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Firefox) to play the game. The game cannot be played on a mobile phone. Players will receive a unique User ID and password to access the game online. The Kinaxis team will provide the professor with the Supply Chain Game URL and student login information prior to game day.
The Kinaxis Supply Chain Game in action.
Testimonials
The Kinaxis platform allows us to orchestrate across different service providers with different systems and capabilities to fulfill certain service instructions, regardless of how complex they are – be it operationally or IT or process-wise. Our key objective is to ensure customers have the best possible service at the best possible rate. Kinaxis is helping us do that."
Brett Sauerman
General Manager - Freight Management Solutions
DSV South Africa
Technology is disrupting almost every single industry and sector at an incredible speed. Our partnership with Kinaxis is boosting our capabilities to evolve our clients supply chains and helping us to create the first real neutral 6PL in Latin America.”
Mauro Gonzalez
Founder & CEO
ALKIMIUS Group
We went through an entire selection process and picked the Kinaxis global cloud platform for supply chain and transport orchestration as the system we would use for the future. Kinaxis ticked all the boxes that were on our list for current and future needs.”
David O’Brien
Senior Director, Business Development
Flex LtD
RapidResponse has improved management’s ability to make decisions based on choices and consequences, and the speed at which they do so.”
Vice President
Fortune 500 Hardware Company
Learn more about the Kinaxis Supply Chain Game
Kinaxis gives you the agility to make fast, confident supply chain decisions. Plan for any future. Monitor risks and opportunities. Respond at the pace of change.