Welcome to The Fresh Connection, the ultimate value chain experience. In this video, we will give you an overview of the simulation. After finishing it, you will be able to try it yourself. The Fresh Connection is an advanced web-based business simulation that challenges a team to create alignment. Participants are required to make tactical and strategic decisions to save a virtual producer of fruit juices from financial ruin, to turn the company around and make it successful again. Every round of decisions in the simulation is half a year in the company. A full course consists of 3-6 rounds, participating in a management team of four, representing the functional roles of sales, operations, supply chain management, and purchasing. This is the My Company screen in the Fresh Connection. It is your cockpit where you can see the most important KPIs. On top, you see the four roles. In the blue column at the left-hand side, you will find the more generic information like inbox, ranking, information, info center, and finance. With the timeline in the vertical orange bar, you can move from decisions in the actual round to information about the previous rounds. By clicking on a role in the previous round, you will get more specific KPIs for that department. The vertical yellow bar shows the performance of your competition. On the right-hand side, you will find the alerts where you will find feedback on the performance of the KPIs with tips how to manage them. Starting at sales, we see a negative ROI and a low performance on service level of only 92%. This means probably unhappy customers. Another issue is the high obsolete level of eight %. That causes a high level of waste in our value chain. Because of the limited shelf life of the products and the level of our inventories, we need to scrap products that are becoming too old. At operations, we see a low production plan adherence, meaning we're not able to produce according to plan, and a very full inbound warehouse causing inefficiencies. At purchasing, we have some issues with the quality and reliability of our suppliers, which can be seen in the delivery reliability KPI and the level of the rejection rate. Let's dive in some more details by going back to sales and opening the product report. The basic assortment only consists of six products. We have two packaging types: the one-liter carton, and the 0.3 iPad bottles. And we have three flavours: the Orange Pure, the Orange with extra vitamin C, and Orange mixed with the mango. Making a total of six stockkeeping units. In the customer report, we see our market consists of three local customers. The largest is food and groceries. A lot of stores and over 50% of the volume we sell. They are the supply chain leader and very important to us. The next retailer is Landmarket. They are smaller. In the Customer Product Report, you see more details. We also deliver a chain of gas stations called Dominics. They only want to sell our pet bottles. In this report, we see our service level per customer and per product differs. They're fairly low. When we go back to the actual round, we see the contract we have in place with our customers. Every half year, you can change the contracts by pressing the Negotiate button. Here we decide, for instance, what service level we're going to promise. At the moment, we promise 95%, but we don't realize 95% at the moment causing penalties. We can change the promise. Let's assume we adjust the promise to 92% only. The effect of this is that our contract index will decrease to 0.93. This contract index is our price index of this customer. We multiply the index with a basic price for every product to get a sales price. So this lower service level promise will lead to substantial lower price level with this customer. If you don't remember what is meant by service level, you can always click in the eye next to it to get an explanation. These eyes you can find everywhere on the screen. A special element in our assortment that we have is the shelf life on the product. Normally, this is 20 weeks. This means we are printing a best before date on the product in the bottling line, exactly 20 weeks from now. This is the moment the clock starts ticking. The shelf life needs a little more explanation. To manage the shelf life, we need a shelf life agreement with our retailer. The shelf life agreement in this example is set to 75%, so the internal shelf life becomes 25%. In other words, the customer is promised a remainder of shelf life of 15 weeks at the moment of delivery. This means inventory of finished products in our warehouse may not raise higher than five weeks. Finish products are not distributed to the customer if the shelf life agreement is violated. If there's no customer left for the product because it's too old for everyone, we call it obsolete and scrap the product against scrap costs. At the moment, we promise 75% shelf life to all customers, but this agreement creates an obsolete level of 8%. By clicking on the Purchasing tab, we can move to the Purchasing Department. The setup with dashboards and reports are similar to the ones in sales. In the actual round, you will find contracts with the suppliers. Again, these can be changed every round, influencing the contract index and price level of every supplier. When switched on, you can even go to the supplier market and choose another supplier with different characteristics for the next round. Probably you need some basic information about what components are needed to make a finished product. This can be found in the Information tab on the left-hand side. Here you can find the bill of material and other basic information about how many products on the pallette, basic prices, number of pallettes in a full truckload, and so on. The value chain of the fresh connection is not very complex. It starts with sourcing raw materials and packaging materials from all over the world. These materials are delivered in the inbound warehouse, one pallet warehouse and a tankyard to store the fluids. From the inbound warehouse, the goods are delivered to production. The production area consists of two steps: mixing and bottling. After production, we have an outbound warehouse, a pallet warehouse to store the finished goods. From there, we have the distribution to our local retailers. The primary process is managed by the operations manager, managing capacities and improvements in the primary process, in production and in warehousing. Here you manage the size of the warehouse and the number of people working there. In the previous rounds, you will find reports on the warehouse. Here you see the performance of the last half year. The inbound warehouse is pretty full. That means that we have to use an overflow warehouse during some periods causing extra costs. In the actual round at the bottom line, you can decide about the number of shifts and some improvement projects. When switched on, you can even sell and buy other bottling lines to improve your infrastructure. By clicking on the light bulb next to the bottling line, you will find all necessary details about the bottling line. These light bulbs, you can also find that suppliers, customers, products, and components to learn more details about these entities. The last department that needs to be managed is the supply chain department. This is all about planning. Here you decide about safety stock per finished product, and you need to decide about how much you produce per batch with the production interval. It says 10 days at the moment, meaning you're producing every 10 working days a batch that needs to cover that period. This planning decision impacts the level of inventory and the number of changeovers in production. Similar type of decisions need to be taken at the component inventory. In the previous round, we see reports again showing details of the performance in the last round with inventory graphs and important data on inventories and service levels for both components and finished products. All decisions in all departments are impacting our financials. We can analyze them by going to the Finance tab on the left-hand side. All team performances are measured and compared. The main KPI to measure success is to return on investment. This means that teams need to manage the cost levels, the revenues, and investment in an aligned way. Here you find the performance on ROI in last round and the round before. Below, you will find details about revenues, costs, and investments. By clicking on a plus, you can find more details. Analyzing different columns helps in understanding the impact of the decisions you made in the last round. The Fresh Connection business simulation provides a meaningful learning experience. You will learn about the need for purpose, strategic objectives, and organizational capabilities; how to bring strategy into action; how to cross-functionally manage the supply chain to collaborate and communicate between different departments; getting rid of functional silos and conflicting objectives and targets; and the power of a so-called sales and operations planning process; acknowledge and manage trade-offs within and across roles, creating an understanding of the end-to-end value chain. The Fresh Connection experience can be tailored to your needs. This depends on your learning objectives and the background of the participants in the course; and, of course, the specific constraints for this course, amount of time you have and how to spread the course over time, or budget and travel constraints. These elements are used to tailor the simulation by choosing the right variant and the right level of complexity. Around the simulation, the format of delivery will be selected. Delivery can be online, with debrief webinars in between the rounds, or in the classroom, or a combination of the two. Now you're ready to try it yourself. By clicking on Enter the simulation in the portal, you will start. In this case, you will automatically play all four roles. The number of decisions is very limited, but it gives you a first taste. By clicking on the Calculate button, you go to the next round and jump half a year in time. You have two rounds available to get a first impression. If there are any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]