About suPlay
suPlay makes serious games and assessment tools for business, negotiation and procurement. We have been building and running them since 2017, designed by people who publish in the field and teach it — and one of them has been tested against conventional lectures in a controlled experiment.
suPlay B.V. was founded in 2017 and grew out of the University of Twente, one of the leading technical universities in the Netherlands and internationally recognised for its research in purchasing and supply management. The Purchasing Game was built there; the rest of the family followed. Everything we have shipped since is still in production and still maintained.
We work with universities and corporate academies internationally, in ten languages. Everything on this site — the games, the tools, the platform they run on — we design, build and operate ourselves, which is why a session that has to work with a full lecture hall behind it usually does.
Holds the Chair of Technology Management — Innovation in Purchasing, Production and Logistics at the University of Twente, and is one of the most published professors in purchasing and supply management worldwide. Ten years in industry with Preussag AG and as a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers and h&z before academia. Co-founder of the European Laboratory on Innovative Purchasing and Supply (EL-IPS).
Assistant Professor in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Portland State University, with a PhD and three Master's degrees from the University of Twente. Associate Editor of the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and a member of the IPSERA Executive Committee; previously Vice-Chairman of NEVI and an analyst in Volkswagen AG's global purchasing department. Heads the suPlay development team.
It is an easy phrase to put on a website. These are the four things we mean by it, each of which you can check.
Kraljic's matrix, Saaty's analytic hierarchy process, Tversky and Kahneman on framing, the dual-concern model of conflict styles. Not house opinion dressed up as method.
Every module in the Minigames catalogue links the work it is built on — the paper, the encyclopaedia entry, sometimes a video. You can check the ground before you put it in front of a class.
In a controlled experiment, 202 students played suPlay and 135 attended conventional lectures on the same content. The game group did better on skill-related, cognitive and affective outcomes, and scored higher on the exam.
That study appeared in the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, a leading journal in the field. Very few procurement training tools have been through this; suPlay is one of them.
“Experimental game-based learning: A serious game experiment in purchasing and supply management” — Vincent Delke, Frederik G.S. Vos, Holger Schiele. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 2025.
The full paper is open on the publisher's site, and the findings are summarised on the research page.
suPlay B.V., Ruwerstraat 9, 7545 SM Enschede, The Netherlands. Questions about a course, a cohort or a custom build reach a person, not a queue.
