Accelerated learning for wood supply managers - the next generation of on-line training tools

The Virtual Wood Supply Arena is an on-line training environment for managing roundwood purchase, production and transport in cut-to-length supply systems. The purpose of its development was accelerated training for coordination of these functions under realistic operating conditions. It offers 8- and 12-week scenarios for supplying five mills. Weekly planning is done for 10 harvesting teams and 10 trucks in a Swedish case geography while tracking mill delivery fulfillment under weekly trafficability restrictions. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the training environment and report the progression of student performance after 2 years of use in university-level training. Student teams reached full delivery fulfillment within three training runs. After familiarization during an introductory run, a complete 12-week scenario took four effective hours to complete. Delivery fulfillment increased from 82 to 95 and 100% between the first, second and third training runs. The progression of team performance included a 36% reduction of relocation distances for harvesting teams and 11% reduction of transport distances for hauling from forest to mill. By the third training run these performance levels were attained with less than 2 weeks of inventory for both the purchase bank and roadside stocks.