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Beer Game

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The Beer Game

How did you manage the decision process throughout the game ? How do you analyse your results? Do you feel you were successful in terms of backorders as well as levels of inventories?
We were the retailer of group 12. At first our customers only ordered 4 items every week so we decided to only order 4 for 2 weeks, and then, in order to cut down our stock price, we decided to cut off our orders to 2 and one week to 0. Right after, the customer demand rose from 4 to 8, and we had a lack of product after the second week and therefore had a lot of backorders, which rose our costs. We decided to order a high amount of products to our wholesaler, but because of the leap time of 4 month, our backorder kept rising and so did our costs. Furthermore, by the time our orders were expected, our wholesaler didn’t have enough stock. As a result our costs rose even more. Once we got all our orders delivered, we managed to sell all our stock and to contain our costs.
We think that all in all we were quite successful, except for the few weeks when we had plenty of backorders, we managed to sell everything we ordered, and keep our costs as low as possible.

Check out the results of the other players in your supply chain. What are your observations? Are there importances differences? If so, how would you explain these differences in a supply chain where players all depend on the very same end-customers?
We can see that the actors of the supply chain that spent the more money are the distributor (1442,5) and the wholesaler (1013). It can be explained by the fact that they depended a lot on the retailer, who didn’t really know how many products to order. It resulted in a sudden increase in the order, that the wholesaler couldn’t satisfy, then the wholesaler ordered suddenly a lot to the distributor, who couldn’t respond either, and it’s the same scheme for the

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