You can read about the bullwhip effect. You can memorize the formula for economic order quantity. You can study every Lean tool in the textbook. And then you step into a real operations system, where demand fluctuates, machines break down, suppliers are late and every decision you make ripples through the entire flow, and realize that understanding operations on paper is a completely different thing from understanding operations in practice.

Games and simulations exist precisely to close that gap. When you play a supply chain simulation and watch your inventory explode because you over-ordered three rounds ago, you learn something about variability and feedback loops that no lecture can replicate. The consequence is immediate, the cause-effect relationship is visceral and the lesson sticks.

The field of Operations Management has accumulated a rich but scattered landscape of these tools, like factory floor simulations, scheduling games, inventory management exercises, lean production role-plays. Yet nobody has mapped that landscape systematically. Which games exist, what topics they cover, what learning objectives they serve and how they should be chosen for a given audience; these questions have never received a rigorous answer.

This thesis builds that answer and then goes one step further. The first part produces a structured classification of existing Operations Management games, mapping their mechanisms, topics and teaching contexts. The second part designs and develops an entirely new game or simulation, one that can be deployed in a real classroom or training session and tested with students or managers.

If you want to do research that is as much about building something as it is about studying something and leave behind a tool that future students will actually play, this is the thesis for you.