Crustfield

You are handed the keys to a delivery-first pizza kitchen where every minute of lead time has a price. In Crustfield Pizza Co., you size capacity against a rising-and-falling demand curve, then take over an existing operation to fix an inherited inventory mistake, pick the right delivery contracts, and manage cash under a ticking bank line. Two linked operations challenges, one score: cash in the bank when the kitchen closes.

Authors:

Dr. Achal Goyal

Academic Partner:

LEVEL

Undergraduate, MBA, Executive Ed, Graduate

TYPE

Single Player

DURATION

180 mins

DISCIPLINE

Operations Management

Introduction

Crustfield is a two-part, single-player operations simulation built around a delivery-first pizza kitchen. In Part 1: Capacity Management, participants take over a struggling kitchen as night-rush lead times creep past the promised delivery window, and must diagnose the true bottleneck, size machine capacity against a demand curve that grows, plateaus, and declines, and time purchases and disposals to maximise cash held at the end of a 268-day run.

Part 2: Customer Responsiveness hands participants a newly built kitchen with zero starting cash and an inherited ingredient policy that is quietly bleeding money. Across 486 simulated days, participants fix the reorder policy, choose between delivery contracts with steep lateness penalties, tune lot sizes against setup costs, and manage a bank line — all while a class of peers plays the identical demand stream, so every score difference reflects decisions, not luck. The design is benchmarked against Littlefield Technologies, a widely used operations teaching simulation.

Learning Objectives

Diagnose the true bottleneck in a multi-step process and size capacity for peak, not average, demand
Time capacity purchases and disposals against a demand curve using utilization thresholds
Design and defend a Reorder-Point / Order-Quantity policy under a multi-day supply lag and a cash gate
Choose delivery contracts using derived lead-time breakevens rather than intuition
Allocate scarce cash across capacity investment, debt repayment, and cash reserves by return

Key Features

Two linked modules: Capacity Management (268 days) and Customer Responsiveness (486 days), playable independently or as a sequence
Turn-based or continuous wall-clock pacing, professor-selectable per cohort
Configurable delivery contracts (Standard, Express, Hot & Fresh) with quoted and maximum lead-time windows and lateness penalties
Slot-scheduled contracts and lot sizes across five time-of-day windows, letting participants target premium service to specific hours
Common random numbers across the class, so every participant faces an identical demand stream and rankings reflect decisions, not chance

Educational Outcomes

Bottleneck diagnosis under demand variability
Reorder policy design under supply lag
Contract selection via lead-time breakevens
Lot-size and setup-cost trade-offs
Cash allocation under financing constraints

Topics Covered

Bottleneck & Capacity Analysis

Demand Forecasting & Utilization

Inventory Policy (ROP/OQ)

Service-Level Contracts & Lead Time

Cash & Debt Management