Beer distribution game
en.wikipedia.org
Beer distribution game
1–10 of 49 posts
Re: Beer distribution game
#2I played this game during orientation when I started my MBA at MIT Sloan (the game was originated at Sloan). In my second year, I facilitated the game.
The most eye-opening thing for me was that a good quarter of students were frustrated and surprised by the bullwhip effect. I'd guess the general population would be even less understanding of a bullwhip effect. I think that help explains why it seems so many people don't understand why it's difficult, even for the U.S. federal government, to create more supply of hand sanitizer, respirators, etc.
P.S. To be clear: I'm not suggesting the federal government isn't to blame for a lack of supply - we should have had a larger strategic reserve of pandemic mitigating supplies prior to the crisis, if only due to the risk of biological weapons (those preparations would have been just about as useful in a non-human-caused pandemic like COVID-19). Nor am I saying the government can't do more right now. The Beer Distribution Game merely helps partially demonstrate why manufacturers, suppliers, and the government (especially if they themselves understand the bullwhip effect!) don't instantly will pandemic supplies into existence.
Re: Beer distribution game
#3I’ve never understood how you win the beer distribution game, people only ever talk about the effects on the supply chain it seems. But how do you mitigate?
Re: Beer distribution game
#4I played this game during orientation when I started my MBA at MIT Sloan (the game was originated at Sloan). In my second year, I facilitated the game. The most eye-opening thing for me was that a good quarter of students were frustrated and surprised by the bullwhip effect. I'd guess the general population would be even less understanding of a bullwhip effect. I think that help explains why it seems so many people d…
It's the same for supply chain professionals.Not sure howyou played and facilitated it,but the versionI had had a first round with no communication. During which all teams, also those consisting of seasoned supply chain people, just fell victim to the bullwhip effect. everytime. Me to, and I knew the effect and the rules of the game.
A nasty thing, this bullwhip effect.
Re: Beer distribution game
#5I’ve never understood how you win the beer distribution game, people only ever talk about the effects on the supply chain it seems. But how do you mitigate?
Communication, as soon as people are allowed to exchange information, results get a lot better. Teams can start planning, based on real customer demand,backlogs and so on. This changes everything.
Re: Beer distribution game
#6LLamasoft/Opex have one, you can play it!
https://beergame.opexanalytics.com/#/ https://opexanalytics.com/beergame/
Re: Beer distribution game
#7I’ve never understood how you win the beer distribution game, people only ever talk about the effects on the supply chain it seems. But how do you mitigate?
Communication, as soon as people are allowed to exchange information, results get a lot better. Teams can start planning, based on real customer demand,backlogs and so on. This changes everything.
Played this game in undergrad and this was my exact experience.
Re: Beer distribution game
#8I’ve never understood how you win the beer distribution game, people only ever talk about the effects on the supply chain it seems. But how do you mitigate?
Basically just keep producing the same amount of product regardless of the amount of demand you're seeing.
Re: Beer distribution game
#9I played this game during orientation when I started my MBA at MIT Sloan (the game was originated at Sloan). In my second year, I facilitated the game. The most eye-opening thing for me was that a good quarter of students were frustrated and surprised by the bullwhip effect. I'd guess the general population would be even less understanding of a bullwhip effect. I think that help explains why it seems so many people d…
The Wikipedia article only has a cursory overview, but I’m strongly reminded of the coordination issues I saw in software rasterizer pipelines, with respect to queuing, load-balancing, and buffering. A lot of novice engineers who approach parallel SW rasterization are surprised when they see production systems & the “buffers” between phases are “one deep” (say, 1024 samples; 128x16 vertices; etc). Explaining why this is both: 1. optimal; and, 2. the stated design goal, is always the first task when onboarding them. (Briefly: we size the phases so they’ve got soft real time guarantees, so that the pipeline is always “smooth”; in a SW rasterizer, you can never “get ahead”, so regardless of your buffering size, the buffer is always “empty” or “full”—never “in between”. Before starting work, you check if your downstream buffer is full, or if your upstream buffer is empty; if so: do something else! That sort of system can be modeled with a buffer of size==1!)
Re: Beer distribution game
#10This reminds me of a cooperative board game named Space Alert:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert
Players are crew members of a 6-room ship, equipped with weapons and generators supplying power (ammo) - all operated manually.
Each round consists of a planning and execution phase. During the former players listen to a pre-recorded track of incoming threats and declare their actions.
In the latter phase the threats start to arrive and the previously planned actions are executed.
The difficulty here is that the planning phase is timed, so the team has to communicate efficiently.
A single bad decision of a single player may doom the whole team, especially that players can and will get in the way of each other.
I remember doing just that - instead of going to the generator, spending a unit of fuel to charge it and distributing power to the turrets I picked the wrong decision card which moved me back from where I started, so my pawn was pressing the right buttons, but in the wrong room.
To make matters worse on my way back I got in the way of my teammate(and informal captain) and prevented him from recharging the generator later, which was important, because our turretwoman was supposed to be firing all the time.
The aliens destroyed that part of the ship killing her and leaving us defenseless.