### Build Custom Business Games — Live, with AI

**A 1-hour live session on building business games — simulations people can play, built around how a real business works. Our worked example is the Beer Distribution Game: we open up the simulation behind it and change it live, with AI doing the modelling — supply chain structure, product structure, demand patterns, lead times, costs, ordering policies, even the wording. Then we demonstrate our new multiplayer capability, hot off the press.**

### Why business games

Many of the hardest problems in a business don't come down to any single decision. They come from how decisions interact — across departments, across companies, and over time. Slides and spreadsheets can describe that structure, but they rarely let people feel it. A business game does. Each player takes a role, makes the decisions that role makes, and lives with the consequences — including the ones caused by everyone else.

That makes the debrief stick. Instead of being told that local optimisation hurts the whole system, players have just watched it happen to them.

### Why the Beer Distribution Game is our example

The Beer Distribution Game has been played since the 1960s, and for good reason. It distils the essence of a supply chain into a handful of simple rules — four tiers, one product, orders flowing upstream, beer flowing downstream, delays in between — and those simple rules produce strikingly complex behaviour. A small change in customer demand turns into violent swings in orders and inventory further up the chain: the bullwhip effect. It isn't bad players; it is the structure.

That is the standard to aim for in any business game: rules simple enough to grasp in five minutes, dynamics rich enough to teach something you would not have predicted. So we use the Beergame as our worked example — and show you how to take it apart and build it your way.

The classic game is fixed. Four tiers, one product, one demand pattern, one set of lead times and costs. The interesting questions start where the fixed game stops:

- What happens with five tiers instead of four? With two? With a network rather than a line?
- What if the retailer could see the factory's backlog?
- What if lead times halved — or demand were seasonal rather than a single step?
- What if it weren't beer at all, but the products, the roles and the language of *your* supply chain — or not a supply chain at all, but a process or an operating model?

In this session we open the model and answer those questions live, with you choosing what we try next.

### What the game actually runs on

The Beergame is a simulation model on **Metapad**, our AI-powered platform for modelling and simulation. The model is not locked away inside the game — it is an open template you can read, copy, run and change. That is what makes this session possible: we are not showing you configuration screens, we are showing you the model.

And the changing is done with AI. We describe the change we want in plain language, the AI assistant makes it in the model, and we re-run. That is the workflow you would use yourself.

> **Try it before you come.** The Beergame model is public in the Metapad template library — [open it here](https://app.metapad.ai/models/16cf74a7-e642-4277-b22a-8b5576bca422). Its landing page has a single-player version of the game: play a round first, then look at the model behind it — you can read it, run the simulation and change things yourself. It is the same model we will be taking apart in the session. Nothing to prepare — but if you arrive with a question you ran into yourself, so much the better.

### Agenda

- **5 min — What's behind the game.** The model itself: the stocks and flows, the ordering policies, and the delay structure that produces the bullwhip.
- **25 min — Customizing it live, with AI.** We change the game and re-run it, with the audience calling the shots — and we talk through what is worth customizing in the first place:
  - **The wording** — roles, products, units. It does not have to be beer.
  - **The supply chain network structure** — more tiers, fewer tiers, branches, multiple suppliers.
  - **The product structure** — more than one product, with shared or separate capacity.
  - **Demand patterns** — a step, a ramp, seasonality, noise, a shock.
  - **Delays and lead times** — shipping, production, and how fast information travels.
  - **Costs and ordering policies** — what players are optimising, and what they are allowed to see.

  One change, one run, one look at what happened to the bullwhip — then the next.
- **5 min — Making it your own.** Metapad supports **custom branding**, so facilitators, trainers and consultants can run the game under their own brand rather than ours. And because Metapad is **multilingual by design**, the same game can be offered in several languages at once — the model is translated, not rebuilt.
- **15 min — Hot off the press: the multiplayer capability.** We are extending Metapad's simulation layer so that any simulation model can become a multiplayer game, with each player taking a role. You define the roles, decide who decides what and who sees what, and put people in the seats. We will demonstrate it fresh — you will be among the first to see it. The Beergame stops being a one-off product and becomes one instance of a general capability.
- **10 min — Q&A and what's next.** Your questions on the model, the platform and the method — and, if you want a game built around your own supply chain or operating model, where that leads.

### Who it's for

- **Educators and trainers** who teach with the Beergame and want variants — a different structure, a different demand pattern, a debrief that shows *why* rather than just *what*.
- **Supply chain professionals** who have run a multigame with their own team and wished the game looked more like their own network.
- **Facilitators and consultants** who run the game regularly, want to build their own presets rather than pick from ours, and would rather run it under their own brand.
- **Modelling practitioners** — simulation engineers, operations research analysts, business engineers — who want to see the model underneath and how it is edited.
- **Leaders and L&D teams** who want to make the dynamics of their own organisation tangible — a game their people can play, not just a slide they can read.

### What you'll take away

- **A sharper picture of what actually drives the bullwhip** — because you will see it change as we change the model, rather than hear it asserted.
- **A working knowledge of how the Beergame is built**, and how it is changed with AI. The model template is open, so you can go and do it yourself afterwards.
- **A concrete sense of what a branded, multilingual variant of the game would look like** for your own teaching, training or client work.
- **A first sight of the new multiplayer capability** and what it opens up beyond the Beergame.
- **A route** if you want a simulation or a game built around your own supply chain, process or operating model.

### Practical

- **Duration:** 1 hour
- **Format:** Virtual (Zoom — link sent on registration)
- **Cost:** Free
- **Dates:**
  - **English** — Thursday, 12 November 2026, 16:00 CET
  - **German** — Thursday, 19 November 2026, 16:00 CET
- **What to bring:** the change you have always wanted to make to the game — or one you tried yourself in the model beforehand. We will take suggestions from the audience and run them live.

## Your Host

**Dr. Oliver Grasl** — Founder & Managing Partner at transentis

Oliver has spent over 25 years in enterprise transformation, bringing business engineering, operations research and analytics to bear on how enterprises actually run. He is the architect of the transentis Beer Distribution Game and of Metapad.

His passion is building models that bring human intelligence and machine intelligence together — computational knowledge graphs that turn complexity into clarity and make change steerable. A simulation you can play is one of the most direct ways to feel that: you do not read about the dynamics, you run into them.

Live session: we open up the simulation behind the Beergame and change it live, with AI doing the modelling — then demonstrate our new multiplayer capability.

Build Custom Business Games — Live, with AI

### Your Enterprise, Live — Enterprise Digital Twins in Practice

**A 1-hour live session for leaders who want to see how their business is running today — and where it is heading. We show a working enterprise digital twin of a professional services firm: its people, their skills, the projects they are on and the revenue they generate each day, updated daily from Jira and Tempo, and projected forward into the months ahead.**

Ask the leadership of a professional services firm three simple questions: *What did we earn yesterday? Who is free next month? Where will revenue land at quarter end if nothing changes?*

In many firms, each answer lives somewhere different. Last month's numbers are in a finance report. Who is working on what is in the time-tracking tool. Skills are in a spreadsheet, or in the heads of a few senior people. And the forecast is a slide deck, built by hand and out of date by the next partner meeting. Each source is useful. None of them is connected to the others.

An **enterprise digital twin** connects them: a live, simplified image of how your business actually operates, which shows what has happened, what is happening right now, and how that projects into the future — in one place, with AI you can ask questions in your own words.

### From vision to working twin

In June, in our webinar *Re-Think Your Operating Model*, we set out the vision: model your business as a **computational knowledge graph**, then connect that graph to your operational data, so that people and AI share one reliable view of the enterprise. We built the structure live — and said that connecting it to live data was the next step.

This session is that next step. No vision slides this time: a working twin, running on live data.

### The example: a professional services firm

Professional services firms suit a first twin well. The business is people delivering work through projects, and the data mostly exists already — in tools like Jira and Tempo, where hours are booked day by day. What is usually missing is the structure that turns bookings into answers.

The twin we show brings three views together:

- **The past** — how utilisation, revenue and project delivery have developed over the past months, reconstructed from the booked hours.
- **The present** — which staff you have, which skills they bring, which projects they are working on, and the revenue each project generates, updated every day.
- **The future** — a simulation that runs forward from today: how revenue develops at the current pace, where skills will run short, and what changes if a project ends early, is extended, or a new one starts.

### Walking our talk

The twin we show is not a mock-up built for the occasion. It is modelled on transentis itself. We have been modelling our own firm for a long time, and bringing it all together in one digital twin is the culmination of that work: our masterdata lives in it, and we run our business on its live dashboards.

For the session we swap in test data. You see the real structure and the real workflow — just not our real numbers.

### How it is built

The twin rests on three layers, and we walk through each one:

1. **An ontology** — the typed vocabulary of the business: staff, skills, roles, clients, projects, rates, bookings, and how they relate. This is what gives the data its meaning.
2. **A knowledge graph of the enterprise** — the actual firm, described in that vocabulary: who has which skills, who is staffed on which project, which project belongs to which client.
3. **Live data** — hours and bookings flowing in daily from Jira and Tempo, attached to the nodes they measure. Revenue is not a report someone compiles; it follows from the bookings, the rates and the structure.

A simulation layer sits on top and runs the whole thing forward. And AI runs across all of it: you ask *"which skills are fully booked in December?"* and get an answer you can trace back to the people, projects and hours behind it.

We built the twin in **[Metapad](https://www.metapad.ai)**, our AI-powered platform for enterprise digital twins. But the approach is the point, not the tool.

### Agenda

- **5 min — What an enterprise digital twin is.** A short recap of the vision: why many digital twins in practice are operational twins with no connection to business model, strategy or operating model — and what changes when the twin is built on a knowledge graph.
- **10 min — The model underneath.** The ontology and the knowledge graph of the firm: staff, skills, projects, clients, rates — and how they connect.
- **15 min — The present and the past, live.** Today's state, updated from Jira and Tempo: who is on what, the revenue each project generates, where capacity is tight. Then back through the history: how we got here.
- **15 min — Into the future.** We run the twin forward and play out what-ifs — with the audience choosing what to try. A project ends early; a proposal comes in; a key person is away for a month. One change, one run, one look at what moved.
- **15 min — Q&A and what's next.** Your questions on the twin, the method and the data — and what it takes to build one for your own enterprise.

### Who it's for

- **Managing partners, COOs and practice leads of professional services firms** — consultancies, engineering and IT service providers, agencies — who want to see revenue, capacity and skills in one picture rather than three reports.
- **Operating Model Owners** — senior leaders accountable for how the enterprise actually runs, who want a live view of it rather than last quarter's slide deck.
- **Transformation Owners** — who need to see what a change is doing to the business while it is happening, not after.
- **Modelling practitioners** — enterprise architects, business engineers, knowledge engineers and operations research analysts — who want to see how an ontology, a knowledge graph, live data and simulation fit together in one working system.

### What you'll take away

- **A concrete picture of what an enterprise digital twin is** — and how it differs from a dashboard, which reports what happened without explaining why or what comes next, and from a business case, which argues for a future but cannot show you the present.
- **An understanding of the three layers** — ontology, knowledge graph, live data — and why the structure has to come first.
- **A sense of how the future view becomes credible**: a twin calibrated against your own history is much harder to wave away than a spreadsheet of assumptions.
- **A first idea of what a twin of your own enterprise would need** — which data you already have, and which questions it could answer.

### Practical

- **Duration:** 1 hour
- **Format:** Virtual (Zoom — link sent on registration)
- **Cost:** Free
- **Dates:**
  - **English** — Wednesday, 18 November 2026, 16:00 CET
  - **German** — Wednesday, 25 November 2026, 16:00 CET
- **What to bring:** the question you would ask your own business if it could answer. We will take suggestions from the audience and put them to the twin live.

## Your Host

**Dr. Oliver Grasl** — Founder & Managing Partner at transentis

Oliver has spent over 25 years in enterprise transformation, bringing business engineering, operations research and analytics to bear on how enterprises actually run. He is the architect of Metapad.

His passion is building digital twins that bring human intelligence and machine intelligence together — computational knowledge graphs that turn complexity into clarity and make change steerable.

Live session: a working enterprise digital twin of a professional services firm — staff, skills, projects and daily revenue, updated from Jira and Tempo, and simulated forward.

Your Enterprise, Live — Enterprise Digital Twins in Practice

### Re-Think Your Operating Model — Live, with AI

**A 1-hour interactive session for Operating Model Owners, Transformation Owners, and modelling practitioners. We start with an empty canvas and build a knowledge graph of an operating model from scratch — live, with you, with AI in the loop.**

Most enterprises run on operating models that live in tacit knowledge, scattered documents, and the heads of senior people.

What if you could turn that mess into a queryable knowledge graph — in real time, with AI doing the heavy lifting?

In this 1-hour live session you'll watch (and join in on) the build itself. We put a fictitious company on the table, share the kind of artefacts most enterprises actually have — a leadership memo, a process write-up, a KPI snapshot, a strategy slide or two — and build a knowledge graph live with AI. 

No prepared demo, no polished result. Just the workflow, as it happens.

We:
  
  - Describe the situation to the AI assistant.
  - Share the documents and watch the assistant parse them.
  - Build the knowledge graph node by node — capabilities, processes, decision rights, KPIs, dependencies — with the audience suggesting what to ask next.
  - Surface tensions, gaps, and the decisions that fall out.


### Agenda

- **5 min — The problem.** Why operating-model conversations stall on slide decks and out-of-date documents — and what changes when you can build the model collaboratively, with AI, in the room.
- **30–40 min — The live build.** A fictitious company (we'll share the brief on the day). A handful of typical artefacts. An empty metapad model.
- **10–15 min — Q&A and what's next.** Your questions on the build, the platform, the method; a walk-through of our **AI-Driven Operating Model Workshop** (our full-day version on *your* operating model, with your real documents)


### Who it's for

- **Operating Model Owners** — CEOs, COOs, CTOs and other senior leaders accountable for how the enterprise actually runs, who want their operating model to be a queryable, improvable artefact rather than tacit knowledge spread across people and slide decks.
- **Transformation Owners** — accountable for a specific multi-stakeholder enterprise transformation, looking for ways to keep the model of the work explicit and useful as the programme evolves.
- **Modelling practitioners** — enterprise architects, business engineers, knowledge engineers and operations researchers who already work with structural and process models and want to see what an AI-grounded, computational version of that practice looks like.
- **Anyone curious** about how AI assistants behave differently when grounded in a typed knowledge graph of an enterprise rather than scraping a pile of documents.

### What you'll take away

- A first-hand view of the *workflow*: how a knowledge graph gets built from prose-and-doc inputs, live, with AI.
- A clear picture of the difference between AI-on-documents (RAG) and AI-as-co-modeller (a *computational knowledge graph* being built in front of you).
- A concrete next step if you want to do this on your own operating model — same workflow, your data, more time.

### Practical

- **Duration:** 1 hour
- **Format:** Virtual (Zoom)
- **Cost:** free
- **What to bring:** questions you'd ask your own operating model if it could answer; a willingness to suggest what to ask next during the live build


## Your Host

**Dr. Oliver Grasl** - Founder & Managing Partner at transentis

With over 25 years in enterprise transformation, Oliver brings deep expertise in business engineering, operations research, and analytics to reshaping enterprises operating models.

Oliver's passion is building digital twins that bring human intelligence and machine intelligence together. 

He believes the best decisions emerge from this collaboration — and builds "computational knowledge graphs" that make this possible, turning complexity into clarity and making change steerable.

Live demo: See how we build a live, queryable knowledge graph of an enterprises operating model

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