The game, created by a group of professors at MIT Sloan School of Management in the early 1960s, aims to teach or demonstrate the fundamentals of supply chain management.
If you haven’t played the Beer Game before, the good people at MIT have created a web version here.
The rules of the game are simple – get the beer to the customer through a multi-stage supply chain with minimal expenditure on back orders and inventory.
Now I know you’re dying to click on that nifty “comment” button below and tell me all about how wrong this beer game can be in real life, educational or not. Of course, supply chain management is hardly as straightforward as the single retailer, single supplier, concrete lead-times scenario the Beer Game puts forward.
(And if I can be honest, when I tried my hand at it on a friend’s laptop over a few at the Intercontinental Hotel I ended up cursing and swearing, but whatever.)
So in my slightly passive aggressive way I’ve named this blog The Beer Blog and making the rules of THIS game simple – The Procurement team will treat this blog as a forum on which we will chat about topics related to the supply chain regardless of industry, but in an offhand, informal manner.
Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to over the past few months has positive things to say about this magazine, believing the roles of the procurement and supply chain directors to soon take on more responsibility and have higher visibility than ever before.
It’s an exciting time for people working in supply chain and procurement, being on the cusp of change. Procurement magazine is glad to be a part of it and we welcome comments, feedback and whatever suggestions you might have.
Happy reading and stay tuned for more insights, opinions and stories in our supply-related posts!
3 comments:
Nice work!
You can look at the assumptions behind the Beer Game and say that they are artificial but I believe that the Beer Game is still very insightful and shows how the supply chain goes through and amplifies demand shocks.
I have to said this, no beer in beer blog...haha. Ok, if your all are beer drinker, and like to introduce place or beer, do drop by http://beerbeer.org to give us some comment and stuff.
I felt cheated entering a beer blog without anything relevent to beer. Cheers!
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