Supply Chain Game Lessons Learned Paper

INTRODUCTION

Purpose

This report summarizes the overall strategy pursued by team one and specifically details the implications of this strategy for the functional area of transportation. Explanation will be given on why I believe our strategy in the first game was not successful and how we ultimately corrected it for a successful second game. I will also give details as to how and why we made changes to our original strategy well into the game.

Problem

Our goal is to manage several aspects of operations and distribution to any or all of five separate markets within a supply chain simulation with the goal of producing the greatest profit. The simulation begins with about 6.8 million dollars of cash on hand, a factory capable of producing seventy units a day and a warehouse capable of holding and distributing all inventory. We must decide whether to build new manufacturing and/or warehousing facilities or to use and/or expand existing ones. We must also decide what method of transportation we will use to move goods from production facilities to distribution facilities. Operating variables are shipping method, order quantity and order point.

Scope

This report explains what went wrong in our first round and how we ultimately corrected it for the second round and applied these corrections to all functional areas. Analysis will be given on why this was effective and led to a winning score for our team.

Research

From the outset of the original game our team felt that an ‘Operationally Agile’ strategy would be the strongest approach. We wanted to be able to quickly meet changing demands as variations occurred between regions. I believe the first round of the game resulted in a loss because of our lack of capacity not allowing us to meet all demand. Our goal for the second round was to minimize the amount of lost demand, while at the same time keeping overall expansion costs to a minimum. This led us to our conclusion that we expand capacity to 200...