Lampshade Game for lean manufacturing

The purpose of this article is to introduce a new simulation game named the ‘Lampshade Game’ that can be helpful in educating students and industry professionals on lean manufacturing principles. The Lampshade Game is an active learning tool that is capable of demonstrating the advantages and disadvantages of some of the key principles of lean manufacturing (such as quality focus, pull system, flexible manufacturing and visual organisation) in comparison to craft and mass manufacturing by manually simulating the production of lampshades for each of the process types. The game enables the comparison of these three manufacturing methods using different operational and financial metrics such as inventory levels, manufacturing cycle time, customer fill rate, production yield and cost and profit. This article describes the game, its objectives, and shares experiences from several classroom implementations including an analysis of pre- and post-surveys.