Bullwhip game

Forecasts seem to be the culprit here, and the bullwhip effect is more about the problems in forecast-driven supply chain than in supply chain dynamics in general. If your supply chain depends less on forecasts and is more aligned with actual consumer behavior, the bullwhip effect may be dampened. Food companies that link point-of-sales data and supply chain planning can tighten the loop between consumer behavior and other activities throughout the supply chain.

If nothing else, the Bull Whip and the Beer Game reveal the systems effect of the food supply chain. Everything is connected, and one failure has dire consequences. Lack of beer is just one of them. You can find her foodmiracle on Twitter because she thinks food is a miracle. Comments Earned: Comments Made: Journals: 0. User Profile. Accepting Trades. Accepting Commissions. Favorite Games. Favorite Gaming Platforms. Favorite Animals.

Favorite Artists. Contact Information. Tumblr asarusbullwhip. I know the place in and out. This is where we work out. The locker room and showers too, of course. But prepare to have a frustrating time finding your locker. Maybe ask someone for help. And I mean desperate , most resort to the coffee shop outside the arena.

Same goes for the president of the federation, Fergus Radcliffe. The IT-guy, Kai, guards his door, though. Bullwhip hosts a wrestling talk show here every week.

And your coach, Renga, sometimes has his cigars behind the building in the dumpster backyard. This is the 1st floor. It overlooks the lobby below. This area comes to life on fight nights. Thousands of people milling about, having snacks and buying merch.

Or, well… it used to be thousands. Lower ratings for our broadcast shows too. Do well, and you can demand a raise! Up the stairs we go, to the 2nd floor. Now, take a deep breath. This is where the magic happens, where a wall of noise hits you when you appear on the entrance ramp. Cameras, lights, fireworks, security… that kind of stuff.

Every once in a while, they gather to lay plans for the time to come. Wonder why… Anyway, careful. See the wrestling ring down below? Yes, I know, the lobby is currently a work in progress. No colors yet, sorry. Now, a final, nifty little thing: Since I made a map of the building, I used it to create an interactive building map in the visual novel.

Wherever you are, you can open the map and check what rooms are around and what people tend to frequent them. Emerson is drawn by Kartos. Check the Artists section for more information on both of them. Just a quick update here. Our friend, Felix, agrees.

This looks much better, and I already imported it into the intro cutscene of the game! Like it? The logo doubles as the logo for the Bullwhip Wrestling federation with just a small text change:. Thanks a lot to KaiDragon for designing it!

This rugged bear with the bushy moustache is your wrestling coach. He wrestled several years for Bullwhip Wrestling himself, and has had a few classic matches worth watching, among them some with Emerson.

Renga welcomes you when you set your foot in the wrestling arena for the first time. He plans to show you around the place, but an abrupt turn of events shifts his priorities.

Larry Navarre: Eight? You got some back-orders here. You might want to take care of that. People will wait for their beer? Larry Navarre: Okay, Hey, alright. Just a little couching there, a little management education. Larry Navarre: Eight. Okay, retail? Larry Navarre: Oh, Tom, this here advanced to one week. Click it back one week. Just click it down one week. After we enter in week 23, then we update. Larry Navarre: Two. Two whole pallets, two whole pallets.

Now click, there we go. Okay, thank you, Tom. Larry Navarre: What do you call that? And Thomas, thank you so much. Were you truly trying to game the system? You started out trying to manage your inventory.

You were — and then what happened? Katie: Well, it says on the instructions that you can choose to add more variations to the game. So I decided to take that risk. Larry Navarre: Oh, okay. So you chose to add — and they really pumped it in there.

Some try to game the system and some try to optimize the system. The reality is that in weeks one, two and three, it was four pallets a week. Actual demand. And they are the only ones that see actual demand. And this is typical of the traditional way of doing supply chains. And in week four, it jumps up to eight pallets per week and then it stays there the rest of the game.

Eight pallets per week. This is called a step change. And it provides a disruption to the dynamics of the system, which everybody tries to compensate for throughout the remainder of the game.

No, this is great, you did a super job. Well done! Okay, this is an exercise to illustrate system dynamics. It was created by MIT.

Our beer game is an acceleration of the whole process. Normally, if you look at this — this is actually Brandeis University — and they use this exercise as an MBA weekend orientation introduction to explain the complexities of business. Participants typically crack the whip. And the idea is that a little change over here by the consumer translates into big changes up the supply chain. The game starts with steady demand, and increase in demand is generated just once.

And this induces variation in the system. Participants try to compensate but errors are amplified. Then we can use the principles of supply chain management to explain what is going on. The most important in supply chain dynamics is variation reduction. Reducing variation is a primary objective of a supply chain manager. The sources of variation in a supply chain are not obvious in this dynamic supply chain system.

And the bullwhip effect is a phenomenon that occurs when, acting in isolation, with limited information, supply chain managers make decisions that are magnified upstream. And it results in stock-outs and over-stocking throughout the supply chain. So that is the principle that is utilized in supply chain management.

Here are the factors that contribute to the bullwhip. It takes, in the game, one week to order and one week to receive product.

So that two week lag causes a delay in the system, which is difficult to monitor. That batching introduces more problems to the system. There are also magnifying effects of inflated orders.

We have to have the material there to sell to the customer or provide for production. And traditionally, that was the case in the supply chain. People simply reacted to what they were seeing in the next participant in the supply chain. And finally, information and decision isolation. Nobody talked to each other.

I have never, ever said that in the beer game, and nobody ever talks to each other. We make our own decisions. Believe it or not, this is fifty years old. This phenomenon was known in distributions in the thirties and the forties but Professor J. Forrester of MIT created a mathematical model to simulate the effects. And you can see the swings.

And I say this in my industry. And compound on that factory capacity. Professor Forrester saw these three principles in system dynamics. Structure: multi-step organization chains like his original observation create structural problems in a supply chain. These kinds of things are delays in the system which compound the problem, and that creates amplification. We overcompensate our decisions to take into account the things that we perceive are going on in the system.

This was his original chart and unless you were alive at this time, which thankfully it was only one year before my birthday.

There were graphic artists that created it. His computer output, on a really old IBM, was dot matrix kind of thing that showed symbols going up and down. And somebody made a very beautiful illustration of system dynamics showing the relationships. All of this he programmed with mathematical equations and he got this knowledge from his electrical engineering background in servomechanism control systems.