Supply Chain Game Write Up

SC Solutions

Our group, SC Solutions was anxiously awaiting the opening of the game in order to gain full access to begin making changes. Unfortunately, our team members had extremely conflicting schedules so we were unable to meet prior to the start of the game to discuss an in depth strategy. Our primary means of communication were established through text messages and occasional emails.

On Wednesday, September 18th we were able to log into the game for the first time. One of the immediate things we agreed upon as a group was that we would not let our excitement for the game lead us to making drastic changes as soon as we were able to. We agreed on making some obvious necessary changes and taking some time to see what the initial changes would do prior to establishing our overall strategy.

In the beginning it was quite obvious that there was an insufficient capacity for the demand. Without having to do any complicated math we broke the previous two years down into four segments and computed the average daily demand (see below).

We saw the need to increase capacity to no less than 40 drums per day (20x50000=1000000). That was our first change that we made immediately after the game began. We did this immediately because an expansion of capacity takes 90 days to complete and we knew we were going to need it as soon as possible. Having just come off of a peak, we knew that we would not miss too much demand in the coming three months, which was comforting.

Immediately after this decision, we began looking at adjusting the order point as well as the quantity. With these two we knew how important the shipping method would be, as well as the lead time that accompanied each of the two shipping methods. Again, with another simple formula we determined that the cutoff point would be 100 units when deciding between shipping methods. If we were shipping over 100 units we would use the truck option and for any amount below 100 units we would use mail. We made this...