Strategy game EDIPS: Students learn the business model with product service system (PPS)

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 | Lehre, Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen
Master's Degree in Business and Engineering at the FHWS: Service Engineering requires new competencies

Global competition as well as new communication channels and information technologies enable product manufacturers to offer a competitive and sustainable business model combined with a service. This enables them to (re)act quickly and flexibly and to compensate for fluctuations in sales in the product business as far as possible and to protect against plagiarism by supplying products and services on the basis of the Product Service System (PSS) business model. Students of industrial engineering at University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt played these business processes in several workshops together with Japanese guest students and scientists with the strategy game EDIPS (EDIPS = Edutainment for Designing Integrated Product Service System) as part of service engineering under the direction of Professor Veselin Panshef.

With the Edutainment offer, company-relevant steps can be tested playfully through strategic thinking in a simulated business environment. EDIPS aims at a fast deployment and real-time operations, in which product-related services play a key role: While the transformation of a pure product manufacturer into a PSS provider represents a special challenge, alliances between a product manufacturer and a service provider are much easier to establish. What is the right strategy?

About the gameplay:

Manufacturers are confronted with various challenges: global competition, diverse customer requirements as well as service requirements in the various product life cycles, convenience, environmental problems. The solution: Establish Product Service Systems (PSS) or form an alliance. The five players, divided into three product providers and two service providers, are to become PPS providers within ninety minutes or form alliances with other providers and develop optimal strategies to win the most points in the end.

The purpose of EDIPS is not to teach a specific design theory, but to convey the philosophy of the development of PSS or the formation of alliances, in particular the reinforcing effect through the integration of products and services. EDIPS demonstrates the strategic thinking of players in an entertaining way.

Further information can be found at EDIPS Film

EDIPS

  • EDIPS can be started with five gamers and a game master with a playing time of about ninety minutes.
  • The roles of the game are those of the product providers as well as those of the service providers. The challenge: Every 15 minutes there are price fluctuations or other events to which the participants have to react. (Photos FHWS / Friese)