Proximity Play — Siri Mattress' Distance-to-Demand Redesign

A four-round, advanced operations-innovation simulation set inside Siri Mattress Public Co., a THB 3.2 billion Thai sleep-products manufacturer that makes value in one plant south of Bangkok and ships bulky mattresses 9 days from the buyer.

On 1 April 2026 its anchor account SleepCo (18% of revenue) terminates over delivery speed: a boxed-mattress disruptor ships in 2 days and lets customers configure firmness online, and two more partners (14% of revenue) will follow unless delivery drops under 4 days.

The board approves a one-time THB 180,000,000 transformation budget — but the proximity menu costs THB 410,000,000, so capital, not ambition, is the binding constraint.

Playing the innovation office, you apply Robert Wolcott's Proximity framework to redesign where value is produced and which proximity technologies you deploy, using time-to-demand (days) as the master metric alongside delivered unit cost (THB/unit), customer satisfaction (CSAT /100) and blended capital payback (months, with a 36-month CFO hurdle).

Round 1: map the distance to demand — read where the gap destroys conversion (the custom and next-day in-store moment, not just export freight), decompose the THB 1,150/unit logistics cost to the ~22% that is 'shipping air', and frame the problem through Wolcott's lens as collapsing distance, not adding capacity.

Round 2 is the core: allocate the THB 180M across localization (THB 35M regional micro-finishing hubs) and proximity technology (compression-and-box THB 60M, made-to-order platform THB 45M, 3D-scan fitting THB 30M, mobile fitting THB 25M), coupling production-localization with demand-capture under the payback rule.

Round 3: pilot under demand pressure — sequence a phased rollout, set a capacity-triage rule, and re-allocate inside the fixed budget when the compression supplier slips and platform adoption lags, protecting CSAT through the transition. Round 4: scale and defend the model to the board, answering 'why not just build another factory?' and winning back or replacing the lost anchor.

The scoring rewards focused, coupled, financeable proximity and measurably punishes the five classic errors: reaching for centralized scale (a second factory produces value farther from demand), spreading the budget thin so time-to-demand barely moves, digitizing the order but not the delivery, ignoring the payback rule with an unfinanceable THB 410M plan, and launching everywhere at once so capacity breaks and CSAT crashes below baseline.

Currency throughout is the Thai baht.

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.