Pepsico Interactive Training Simulator
12 Apr 2020
Project Film
Summary
PepsiCo’s Lean Six Sigma (LSS) program has traditionally relied on hands-on, in-person building block simulations to teach process improvement methodologies across nearly 200 countries. When the pandemic forced all training online, Zoom-based PowerPoint sessions proved ineffective — as Marco Rodriguez Tapia, PepsiCo’s LSS Master Black Belt in Europe, put it: “Five days in front of the camera through Zoom watching PowerPoints was very, very difficult for most people.”
The solution came from an unlikely source: Minecraft. The game’s block-building mechanics mapped perfectly onto the existing LSS curriculum without requiring any changes to the training model itself. The result was a first-of-its-kind virtual training experience — built around a Minecraft recreation of a PepsiCo warehouse — now available in seven languages and used by thousands of employees each year.
As featured on PepsiCo’s official newsroom: “It shows that you can teach and you can work efficiently by having fun.”
My Responsibilities
- Client Management — Worked directly with high-level PepsiCo executives throughout the project lifecycle, maintaining clear communication, managing expectations, and ensuring deliverables aligned with the company’s training goals
- Requirements Extraction — Led discovery sessions with stakeholders to translate PepsiCo’s existing Lean Six Sigma curriculum and in-person simulation model into a concrete technical and design specification for the Minecraft environment
- Engineering Development — Sole developer responsible for building the full Minecraft experience in Java, including custom gameplay mechanics, warehouse simulation logic, and multi-language support infrastructure
- Design — Designed the in-game PepsiCo warehouse environment and training flow from the ground up, ensuring the visual and interactive experience faithfully reflected the real-world LSS process improvement exercises
- Playtesting — Organized and conducted playtesting sessions to validate that the training scenarios were intuitive, engaging, and pedagogically sound before rollout to thousands of employees globally