Beer Game Case Study

1163 Words3 Pages

Part A

In the beer game, the two main problems that cause high inventory or backorder costs associated with the ordering policy of each participants; are the uncertain demand and the lack of communication between different participants in the game who are the retailer, wholesaler, distributer and manufacturer. In order to operate the supply chain efficiently, the participants of the beer game should be in a coordination to fulfill the customer demand. In the first weeks, our inventory could keep up with the incoming orders in the supply chain which is the ultimate affect of the uncertain customer demand. As the wholesaler, I was dealing with the orders of the retailer who is responsible for the direct customer orders which was stable at …show more content…

Because I did not expect the demand to be stable at 4, my inadequate order quantity lead to backlogs to fulfill the retailer’s request. When I started to backlog the demand, I decided to increase my order quantity to eliminate backorders and still have an inventory policy that minimizes the total cost. However, there was an unexpected delay in the fulfilling of my order from the distributor. The amount of beer that I requested couldn’t be delivered and I received shortages in my deliveries in the second and the third quarters. Because the demand was stable and not decreased when my inventory level was under zero, my effective inventory got even more negative. When I started to receive my initial requests from the distributor which were in high quantities to effectively minimize the backlog cost, my effective inventory started to approach zero …show more content…

So that our decisions would lead to a better performance on the inventory levels which means a more stable inventory according our policies but our order policy based on the expected demand would not be changed while the impact of our policy on the inventory is better because our orders are met with a better

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