Newsletter – Week 4 – “Scope At Last”

A Narrowed Scope

Week four was a productive one with our team’s branding coming together and a more solid idea for our project finally falling into place. We have communicated a number of ideas to our client and have been able to agree upon the major components we must include as well as established a game framework to implement them in.

Our Idea

The most important component we have agreed upon is the inclusion of a collaborative plant design element. This part will work with general plant regions. Within this, we are able to look into individual sets of stations and define the order of operations that is to occur within them based on real product assembly taxonomies supplied by GM. Both of these processes, plant reorganization and station reorganization, will be maintain assembly line precedence (the fact that certain parts must be installed before others) and will be used to define the facility’s efficiency. Efficiency will also be ranked using a system similar to how Google tracks the popularity and relevancy of web search results. By indexing the designs that our users create and how often a given design is viewed and referenced by the users, we will be able to establish how well designed it is. Combined with tracking throughput and profits over time we will then be able to award points and accurately rank the success of a design.

Our general audience for this game remains mostly high school and college players in a competition. But the product will be scalable and potentially detailed enough that it could begin to satisfy the concerns of engineers within GM as well, who would be able to rapidly deploy new taxonomies and test to determine if they were efficient.

Quarters and Where We’re Going

With quarters approaching, we are working to finalize our presentation and project schedules. We are confident we now have a grasp on what we will deliver. Additionally, we now feel that our clients are on the same page as us and that we will be able to make strategic development decisions quite rapidly as production begins to ramp up.

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