Week 3- June 27th

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.