We played this inventory and supply chain game in operations management class the other day. We were suppose to form teams of four, each team selling one product and each member became a part of the supply chain: retailer, wholesaler, distributor, and factory.

The objective of the game was to satisfy all the downstream demand while keeping holding and backlog costs as low as possible. This is to be played for 50 weeks. Each week, we'd have to satisfy the demand from the downstream and also place an order to our upstream. And the catch was we weren't allowed to communicate to each other except through the orders.

What seemed to be a pretty simple game turned out to be a hillarious two hours as we fought backlogs and huge orders to accumulate an inventory level that i believe is probably the highest in my level lol!

Let's put this in perspective.... at the end, we looked at all the future demand if we were to continue playing and realised that each week's demand was only 8 units by the end user.... However, inventory we carried amounted to:

retailer (pam) 67 units, wholesaler (me!) 327 units, distributor (adeline) 500+ units, and the winner the factory (xenia) 2000+ units!

Based on the constant demand of 8 (which is already the max), this meant that our total inventory was enough to last us for.... 361 weeks; which is equivalent of 6.5 years! If my lecturer found out, i think we'd become like some case study or something lol... we were supposed to graph out the costs and inventory levels too, but we exceeded the axis provided by so much that it wouldn't be accurate anymore. Was fun though :p don't think it'll help me too much if i mentioned it during a job interview for an operations position haha

Heh heh! I plotted the graphs lol...
» shortieadel (165.21.155.90) on 2008-04-03 12:52:57

cool haha ours so screwed up :p
» Koban on 2008-04-07 08:37:13

lol.. dont think so..cos demand in the market when u are really outside tend to fluctuate and not stay at 8 all the time..so ur interviewer probably will understand...i hope..might even score some points letting him knw u played the game before..in terms of experience and stuff, hah.
» HellSinG on 2008-04-08 02:07:56

ahh we now know it is called the bullwhip effect lol
» Koban on 2008-04-09 02:00:37

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