The Development of a Business Game for Wholesale Management

The advent of low-priced powerful microcomputers has begun to have a revolutionary impact on both the development and application of simulation games used in management training. In the retail trades where there is a long tradition of games usage, manual games such as Retail Inventory Management Game, Outlet and Shoprofit are increasingly coming under pressure from computer-based packages including Co-op, Supermarket, Stockshow and Supertrain. In contrast the use of games by wholesale firms specific to any section of their own business is virtually unknown. In fact as as far as we can ascertain, there have been no such games available in the UK until now. In this article we describe a new game WHOLETRAIN, developed jointly between UMIST and MAKRO for use in wholesale cash and carry junior management and supervisory training. The Wholetrain package was routinely adapted from an existing computer simulation and we outline the process by which this was achieved.