I must admit that I was just downright excited about our week 3 class (which is no small feat for someone who has pretty much been in school for eight out of the last ten years). This was the class where we started an even more complex supply management game. We used the first fifteen minutes of the class to go over rules and to get a better understanding of which variables we could control. We then spent the next 15 minutes looking through the graphs, charts and text within the game to better understand our objective and to evaluate the history of transactions that happened before we joined up with the game.
With the push of a mouse button Professor Hughes started the game and the clock ticked forward. Every real-time 15 minutes equaled one day in the game. To be quite honest my teammate Wick and I felt like we had very little idea of what we were supposed to be doing by the time the game was underway. And as the first few days past and we became accustomed to the game's interface it felt like we had even less of an idea of our strategy or even what variables we could change.
By the time one hour passed (or 4 game days) there still had been very little movement on the board amongst any of the teams. One thing I did learn (from the beer game) is that it is important to start ramping up supply for the long haul early so that we don't have to start the game in a huge hole and try to make up for supply throughout the whole game. By day 5 within the game we made a push to improve our factory production from 20 barrels a day to 40 barrels at the cost of 1 million dollars.
The felt like the move to build an aditional factory producing 20 additional barrels was the best move we could make to start the game and get a leg up on the teams we were competing against: donothing, 3 guys and scam. The only thing I was questioning was should we build even another factory on top of that for a total yield of 60 barrels a day?
After buying an additional factory we instantly dropped to last place in overall capital. At that point all we could do was pack up, go home and watch for 90 (in game) days to unfold and watch the effect it has on our profit.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Week 2- June 20th
During week 2 of our supply chain management class we played the "beer game." The beer game is a classic learning experience for those involved in the supply chain and operation management world. The game is comprised of a factory, distributor, wholesaler and retailer. The object of the game is to keep the supply flowing evenly throughout your given timespan, but without keeping surplus stock by the end of the timespan.
I think most grad students within the class had played the game before and had a pretty good idea of what strategy they would use from the very get go. The only problem is that I think we all didn't learn from our past mistakes and relied to much on the "old" information coming from the other teams. When I think back on how I played this game last time (In Jim Rand's Operations Management class) I remember how throughout the whole game we always struggled to keep up with supply. So the big question is, How come we were unable to see the same predicament happen all over again?
I think one of the obvious answers is that we weren't allowed to talk with one another. Some of us who had been exposed to this game could have clued in other players as to the expected outcome. But I think an even bigger factor is that we actually trusted the relayed information being sent from down the pipeline. We were oblivious of the fact that we were adjusting allocations based on news that was considered to be 2 weeks old and even more oblivious to the fact that the supplies we were sending along wouldn't reach the retailer until 8 weeks after their request.
In hindsight I think the strategy we should have used was to have the factory send out as much stock as they could for the first 8 weeks and push the product as quickly as possible to retailers to make sure that they could keep up with initial demand. Once those first 8 weeks were over then I would start sending quantities out based on the average demand you saw over the first 8 weeks. The thing you absolutely want to avoid is being stuck without product early in the game because most likely you are going to spend the whole game trying to recover from the loss.
I think most grad students within the class had played the game before and had a pretty good idea of what strategy they would use from the very get go. The only problem is that I think we all didn't learn from our past mistakes and relied to much on the "old" information coming from the other teams. When I think back on how I played this game last time (In Jim Rand's Operations Management class) I remember how throughout the whole game we always struggled to keep up with supply. So the big question is, How come we were unable to see the same predicament happen all over again?
I think one of the obvious answers is that we weren't allowed to talk with one another. Some of us who had been exposed to this game could have clued in other players as to the expected outcome. But I think an even bigger factor is that we actually trusted the relayed information being sent from down the pipeline. We were oblivious of the fact that we were adjusting allocations based on news that was considered to be 2 weeks old and even more oblivious to the fact that the supplies we were sending along wouldn't reach the retailer until 8 weeks after their request.
In hindsight I think the strategy we should have used was to have the factory send out as much stock as they could for the first 8 weeks and push the product as quickly as possible to retailers to make sure that they could keep up with initial demand. Once those first 8 weeks were over then I would start sending quantities out based on the average demand you saw over the first 8 weeks. The thing you absolutely want to avoid is being stuck without product early in the game because most likely you are going to spend the whole game trying to recover from the loss.
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