Serious gaming for raising awareness of digitalization opportunities in supply chains - a study at Nutricia

The fourth industrial revolution is changing the way of working and manufacturing in multiple ways. The increasing digitalization of business processes makes employees more productive, lowers costs for firms, reduces the environmental footprint of the companies, and improves the quality of services. While born-digital companies built their business process around digital opportunities by default, many large traditional companies are lagging behind in digitalization. This work aims to raise awareness of the opportunities of the digital world for the employees of large pre-digital era companies. This study was conducted at Nutricia, the subsidiary of Danone, focusing explicitly on the Deployment team, which was treated as a service provider. This work tackles the digitalization problem by developing a serious game to be played by the company's employees. To design this game, the first activity was a systematic literature review conducted to investigate the earlier applications of serious games for digitalization in supply chains. This leads to the identification of a significant research gap, as it was concluded that no serious game was developed with the purpose of initiating business process digitalization in companies. This project builds on the design science approach in the context of digitalization. An artifact was developed based on requirements collected as the first step to reach the design objective. The list of requirements was obtained based on further literature studies about digitalization and background on gaming. After the literature review, a case study was conducted on the Deployment department of Nutricia that defines additional requirements for the game design. Initially, additional knowledge was collected about the company's organization and supply chain, followed by a focused analysis of the Deployment department's business processes. Second, a survey was conducted to assess the awareness of employees amongst six planners and the team lead. The outcome confirms the need for a serious game at Nutricia as employees find digitalization beneficial; however, they lack ideas on how to continue with the digital transformation of their process. Thus, it specifies the game's design objective: the aim is to raise awareness for employees on the digitalization opportunities at the company, including how to do it and how to benefit from it. Furthermore, the results can also support the process selection and function as data input for the game design process. The most suitable business process was selected for the game in terms of showing players the digitalization opportunities. The final game design, called DigiGame, consists of two phases. Players puzzle the business process from given building blocks in the first phase and digitalize it in phase two using the available technologies. Besides completing daily tasks, participants need to select a step of the business process they want to digitalize. Then, the player is shown a hint regarding the applicable technology, which is guessed by the other player based on the description given by the initiator. The digital maturity of the process is represented by a heat map and an overall digitalization level indicator. The game is won when all technologies have been applied. Five game sessions took place, with altogether ten employees from the company. A game session consisted of a short introduction, the gameplay, and a debriefing session. After the completion of all sessions, a collaborative debriefing session took place to discuss further insights with the whole team. The game sessions were evaluated qualitatively based on transcripts. The prepared documents were coded, categorized, and networks were created with the Atlas.ti software. DigiGame, the developed artifact, provided a solution for an open business need at Nutricia, resulting in the primary practical contribution of this work. Employees became more aware of the advantages of a digital business process and already started thinking about implementation details after discussing a conceptional implementation plan. Moreover, the game session contributed to the organizational learning at Nutricia. Considering the theoretical contributions, the research confirmed the results of earlier work regarding the high potential of using serious games for raising awareness. Additionally, it was proven that a game could provide a digital mindset and introduce the opportunities of digital transformation in a business context to non-IT-focused employees, providing answers to open questions introduced by multiple previous works. Overall, it can be concluded that DigiGame successfully raised awareness on the digitalization opportunities at Nutricia for most players. The game was most effective for players who had experience with the analyzed process. Some players acquired a digital mindset during the game session and considered other business processes for digitalization options. While inexperienced players obtained little knowledge about digitalization opportunities, they stated that they had learned a lot about the process itself. Notably, no previous work revealed similar observations. Thus, it can be concluded that the game sessions contributed to the development of the participants in a diverse way. The main limitation of the game is that in the current form, it is applicable to Nutricia's process only; however, it was designed keeping in mind simple adaptability to alternative business processes. Future research is proposed in the direction of a more general game that can be adopted easier to multiple companies. Additionally, evaluating the game on a larger sample is also the subject of interest.Management of Technology (MoT