YieldForge
A yield management simulation
“The plant is full. The money is missing. Find it.”
You are the new general manager of Tempo Precision, a contract manufacturer with more orders than machine hours. Your predecessor left the plant's best utilization record and its worst margins.
Taught in Managerial Economics, Managerial Accounting, Operations Management, ready to teach on Pedagogix Course Designer.
See what YieldForge feels like
Transcript of the YieldForge intro video Captions are part of the video
You are the new general manager of Tempo Precision, a contract manufacturer with more orders than machine hours. Your predecessor left the plant's best utilization record and its worst margins. Each week you decide which orders to run, reprice, outsource, delay, redesign, or decline. A full plant can still lose money, and the game shows you why.
The experienceTempo Precision sells three kinds of capacity: milling, molding, and inspection. Milling cuts the molds that molding needs, and inspection cannot be bought from a partner at any price. Five customers send work, from Kestrel Aerostructures with its rich margins to Halvorsen Industrial with high volume and thin ones.
You play the first two weeks on instinct and the utilization gauge. In week three LAMBDA, your yield copilot, starts to show what an hour on each machine is worth, and it re-prices the choices you made in the first two weeks. From then on every order card shows what the order earns beside what its hours could earn elsewhere.
About every other week a customer calls on Thursday with an emergency job worth two to three times the normal return per hour, and only a plant that held hours back can take it. Customers keep score too. An account that you let down does not complain. It sends less work and stops calling. YieldForge Standard runs six weeks in about 45 minutes. YieldForge Advanced runs eight weeks in about 60 minutes and adds more disruptions, some with no warning, as well as cancellations, capacity investments with lead times, fixed-price contracts, and a two-way marketplace.
- Utilization is the wrong scoreboard. A machine hour sold to one customer is an hour that a better customer cannot buy.
- Price the scarce hour before you spend it, and expect shorter notice to be worth a higher price.
- Hours held in reserve are a bet on urgent demand, and the bet has a cost.
- A redesign that removes machine time from a part adds capacity as surely as a new machine does.
- Scarce capacity is rationed through relationships, so a broken promise costs more than an honest refusal.
- Opportunity cost becomes a habit of thought. Students judge every use of a scarce resource against its best alternative use, and the habit applies to any business with a constraint.
- Operations, pricing, and sales usually work to different measures. Here the student manages all three by one measure and sees what coordination is worth.
- Should the plant take certain work now, or hold capacity for urgent work that may never come? The student makes that choice every week, with money at stake.
- The game lets students feel the pull of a familiar metric and then shows what the metric cost them. They leave more willing to question what their own organization rewards.
- Company and role
- General manager of Tempo Precision, Inc., a contract manufacturer of machined and molded parts, with plant manager Gus Elmqvist, CFO Priya Raman, and the LAMBDA copilot
- Discipline
- Operations and pricing
- Also fits courses in
- Revenue management, managerial economics, customer management
- Format
- Solo. You are ranked against five computer-run managers who play the same order book. A run code makes every market repeatable, and the same market can be played at both depths
- Time
- Standard: six weeks, about 45 minutes. Advanced: eight weeks, about 60 minutes. Play Standard first
- Advisers and AI
- LAMBDA computes the value of every machine hour live in your browser each week. Gus and Priya brief you from the same numbers and disagree about what they mean
- How you are scored
- Contribution captured: your contribution as a share of the best result computed for your run. Ninety percent is an excellent run. Your tier, from The Airline down to The Busy Bankruptcy, also counts profit, the return on contested hours, emergency calls caught, and customer standing
- Teaching materials
- In-game briefing and a three-part debrief that scores each lesson from your own decisions
- Audience
- Executive education and MBA courses in operations and pricing
YieldForge beside Littlefield
Littlefield, from Responsive Learning Technologies, is the simulation most programs already know here. Where ours differs: Adds the revenue side: which orders to accept, and at what price, when machine hours are scarce.
| What is compared | Littlefield | YieldForge |
|---|---|---|
| Who plays | Teams | One student |
| Time | From a two-hour class session to a seven-day contest | 45 minutes at Standard depth, 60 at Advanced |
Formats and times come from each publisher's own product page, September 2026.
YieldForge comes ready to run in class
In-game briefing
Three-part debrief scored from your own decisions
LAMBDA, the yield copilot
Run codes that make every market repeatable
Standard and Advanced depths on one engine
Instructor dashboard
Ranking against five computer-run managers
Contribution captured against the best result
Bring YieldForge to your classroom
You can check out online in a few minutes. For a campus or a big group, just ask us for a quote.