Moving Lego bricks around

‘Okay, every group has its own factory. Based on customer orders, you build towers of different colours of Lego bricks. But your factory only has one colour in stock. This means that you have to purchase the colours you need.’ 

Serious Gaming is used at BUas to provide an insight into logistics processes. In the propaedeutic phase (first year), logistics students are given seven weeks to work on this game. Finances, planning, everything they have learned is dealt with in the game. It is played throughout the entire building. 

‘Renting a truck is expensive, so you definitely don’t want it to drive empty. And yet you have to start driving, otherwise you won’t be able to handle your orders properly. Driving an empty truck will get you four penalty points. Driving a loaded truck will set you back only one penalty point. Because after all, the driver will have to be paid and there is the depreciation of your vehicle fleet to be considered. Completing one tower will earn you two points. But towers and bricks have to be transported in different trucks.’  

You might think that the first-year students would be dazzled by the amount of information they are presented with, but fortunately, they are used to that. 

‘So what do you need to do? Keep the number of movements to a minimum and process your orders effectively and in time. You will have five minutes to come up with a strategy.’ 

So, it’s kind of like a real-life game of Stratego. Because in the end, it’s all about choosing the right strategy. And that is great fun to watch. There are the doers, who drive off with an empty truck straight away. That’s obviously not the way to go, and it gives them four penalty points. And there are the thinkers. ‘Is it okay if we work together?’ ‘Well now, if that’s was the line of thinking of the entire logistics sector in the Netherlands, you wouldn’t have so many half-empty trucks driving around. But apparently there’s no crisis going on in the Netherlands, because strangely enough, loads being combined to remove duplicate truck journeys is hardly the order of the day.