Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author:

Reviewer: 1

Comments to the Author
The authors present a summary of the supply chain management game designed by Vital Roux which Touzet & Corbeil published on in 2015, and briefly comment on the Beer Game and the Global Supply Chain Simulation. The authors make two claims with respect to the inadequacies of the Beer Game and the GSCS: (1) that they provide partial or modular experiences of a supply chain which prohibit students from piecing the modules and concepts together after the game and (2) that prevents students from achieving the major learning purpose of minimizing the total system cost. In response, the authors present a new “flexible supply chain management game” which they developed on spreadsheets. The authors describe the game and summarize their pilot study where the game was played twice by two undergraduate supply chain management classes. From these four game play sessions, the authors provide six results tables which list the quoted prices and selling prices set by the wholesalers, manufactures, and suppliers, and the wholesalers’ sales, the manufacturers’ inventory throughout the game. After playing the game twice, the classes were debriefed. For the results section, the authors discussed their observations from the game sessions.

Authors noted that because the game sessions were limited to 4 hours, students did not complete the intended learning objectives – the bullwhip effect was not covered. However, the authors recommended that in the future, the game should not only be a major part of supply chain management courses, but also that the game should become a significant part of supply chain management course curriculum wherein more and more features are progressively introduced to suit new learning objectives, throughout the course.

Overall, the topic of this paper is of potential interest for the Simulation & Gaming audience. However, if this paper is to be suited for publication, it will require an over haul of the introduction, methods, and results sections.  The design of the game and of its use as an educational intervention should be informed by prior game-based learning research and proven assessment methodologies. The introduction should be rewritten to create a well-cited case for leading into the problem statement. The problem statement should be narrow and focused. The thesis should be novel, defensible, and seek to address some aspect of the problem statement. The methods should detail how the study is conducted and how the data collected pre/post and during the intervention is used to test and validate the thesis. Finally, as another reviewer once told me, observations should be based on a solid empirical inquiry / investigation. If such an inquiry has been conducted, I suggest that you introduce further the protocol used to produce the results. I also suggest focusing on one or two supply chain management concepts and trying to rigorously demonstrate the postulated effects of the simulation game.

The introduction was broad, poorly cited, and lacked a demonstration of the vast amount of prior research that has been done to improve upon the scientific soundness of simulation and game-based-learning practice and assessment methodologies. The authors provided a history lesson that resulted in a problem statement that seemed disconnected and unresolved by the proposed intervention. After describing three supply chain management games, the authors generalized that all previous supply chain management games “provide just partial or modular experiences of a supply chain, prohibiting students from piecing the modules and concepts together after the game to achieve the major learning purpose, which is to minimize the total system cost”. This remark was given with no confirming citations and no demonstrational examples. The authors follow their claim with the unclear thesis that they were able to create a game that encompasses the whole supply-chain and relevant activities.

The intervention was explained, but the novel aspect of the game was not highlighted in a sufficient manner for the reader to understand how the intervention is new approach for addressing the problem statement.
As a reader, I am unsure how the presented game differs from other supply chain games. The authors call this game “flexible” but fail to describe what about the game’s design or game play makes it flexible. The authors provided little to no description of the game’s learning objectives which were given as, “supply chain management concepts and relationships”. The authors refer to “more complex learning objectives” but never explained what these objectives are or how the game play allows for these objectives to be fulfilled. 

The methods section describes who played the game and for how long the game was played. However, the section did not document the type of research conducted or the protocol used for assessing the effectiveness of the intervention. Despite the pilot study objective, “To investigate the decisions made by students during the game and to synthesize their understanding of business and SCM concepts based on their decisions.”, neither qualitative or quantitative methods were employed to analyze the study’s results. The study did not use pretest/posttest. The authors mentioned that the students were debriefed, but no debriefing methodology was provided.

The authors collected the students’ decisions on spreadsheets for documenting the results of each game session and these tables where provided as the results section of the paper. The results section provides a summary of the game activities and the authors’ interpretation of the decisions that the students made during the game. As the reader, I am left without a clear understanding of how the game improved students’ understanding of supply chain management concepts.

The authors’ conclusions were not substantiated by the pilot study summary. As the reader, I can believe that participants were able to make business decisions, learned to negotiate, and form supply-chain relationships. However, I am left without understanding how “participants’ understanding and applications of price competition, sales forecast and inventory management were evident from the spreadsheets”. Lastly, the authors concluded that all learning “happened while playing the game, not after debriefing”, which their results did not demonstrate. Furthermore, this statement is in contradiction with prior literature on debriefing and experiential learning, where time for reflection is demonstrated to be a critical component of the transformational learning process.



Reviewer: 2

Comments to the Author
First, it was a real pleasure for me to read such well-written article on an interesting and important game-related research.

In this article, the authors discuss the design and effects of a flexible supply chain game. They provide a good motivation for games used as educational approach for supply-chain gaming. Furthermore, they use classical and more recent examples of other supply chain games to illustrate the innovative character of their own approach. Both parts of the introduction are thoroughly deduced, and appropriate literature is used.

It would be good for the clarity of the study, to add some more detail to the description of the sample [234ff] (such as number, gender, age…).

In addition, to understand the context of the study, it would be good to add a short description of how the game is embedded in the whole course, e.g. what kind of educational methods are additionally used, and how the course as a whole is structured.

On lines 254-255, the authors describe the role of the facilitator in the game. It seems to be quite a heavy role, representing different roles in the supply chain. It would be good to explain why the task of the facilitator is that heavy, and what the motivation for and benefits of this decision are.

From line 295 ongoing, the authors introduce their approach of data collection and analysis. For the sake of repeatability and assessment of the quality of the data analysis, I recommend to add an explanation of the method of data analysis used in the study.

From a personal point of interest, I would like to hear about more about this research, and whether the game could also support and illustrate the idea of a supply ecosystem, and not only the system of supply chain.

At the end of the article, a discussion section should be added, where the results of the study should be discussed in the light of the related work. Here, the authors should highlight, based on their results, how the new approach answers the shortcomings the authors identified in the existing supply-chain games. As the reference list is rather short, some more recent literature could be used to explain the findings.



Reviewer: 3

Comments to the Author
In the present article, the objectives of the newly developed game are only briefly formulated in general terms.
Line 398 states that the game can meet new learning objectives. These new learning objectives are not accurately named and are therefore not sufficiently comprehensible.
The stated improvement in the understanding of SCM concepts as a result should be described more exactly.

The game is described as "flexible" and suitable for a blended learning approach. For me as a reader, these two statements are unfounded and not comprehensible.
The question arises whether the flexibility in the game results from a spreadsheet and how or from other elements.
In which form and setting can the game be used for blended learning.

A more comprehensive description of the contents of the debriefing (Table 7 - 4.1) would be helpful to assess the results and learning effects

More details describing the method and explaining the data for the analysis increases the statement.

I would recommend to publish the article instead a full research article as a case study in the section simulations ready to use.