Groningen students win Global Supply Chain Competition

On 27 March, Gerben Meyer, Stephan Keuper and Niels Alberts of the Faculty of Management and Organization won the Global Supply Chain Competition. They had the most successful marketing strategy for purchasing and selling computers. The Groningen team beat twelve other university teams from the United States, France, India, China, Finland and Taiwan. The prize for the winning marketing strategy was a portable GPS system.

The game

At the start of the game, each team received USD 200,000. They could use this money to purchase 4 products, including laptops and multimedia systems. Each team had to devise a strategy to maximize profits in the long term.

The game was played at 2 p.m. local time, very convenient for the Groningen participants.

During the game, each team (= competing computer company) had to decide which computers to produce, where to purchase parts, how to organize the distribution, how expensive the products should be and where they should be sold. In addition, they had to predict their sales based on market conditions and place orders. Every decision made by one of the participating teams had an immediate effect on the other teams. Although the game lasted for several hours in ‘real time’, in the virtual game several months went by.

Groningen strategy

The Groningen students were very aggressive players. ‘We immediately purchased 200 computers and 200 multimedia systems. The laptops cost USD 1000 each, so our capital was spent immediately,’ according to Gerben Meyer. ‘We wanted to buy the computers in bulk so that we’d have the best purchase price and thus be able to sell under the market price. We could buy anywhere in the world and decided to sell only in Europe.’

The Groningen students also accepted orders even when they had no more computers in stock. ‘We had to pay a fine, but at least we prevented our opponents getting those orders. It was risky, but it all turned out well in the end.’

Interactive

The Global Supply Chain game was designed by the University of Delft, under supervision of dean prof. Henk Sol of the Faculty of Management and Organization of the RUG. Gerben Meyer is enthusiastic about the game. ‘You can see immediately what your market share is and what the competition is doing, and that makes the world trade suddenly very realistic.’