A Game-based Approach to Understand Human Factors in Supply Chains and Quality Management

Quality management is an important function for viable production networks. In order to qualify decision makers to understand the fundamental principles of quality management in production networks, a game-based simulation and learning environment is developed, which can furthermore be used to understand how human factors influence the quality of decisions in complex production networks. Previous studies have shown that underlying factors must exist, which predict the players’ performance. It is currently unexplored, which factors are contributing to high performance. To deeper investigate which human factors are critical for supply chain success and to further refine the quality management game a series of studies were examined. As expected, expertise had a great impact on performance, however contrary to the expectations cognitive skills had none. The refined decision dashboard, with seamlessly integrated self-adapting visualizations on key performance indicators, had a significant positive impact on game performance. The studies suggest that the developed game is a valuable contribution for the qualification of quality managers, as the quality of decision increased.