Supply Chain Review

Supply Chain Simulation Results Report

IDIS 614 – Capar

Harry Roberts Keith Ceder

Dee Ellis Corey Foster

Make a plan, then work the plan! Everything starts with a plan. A good plan starts with good data. Unfortunately, miss-interpreting the “good” data can cause errors in the plan. In the case of this Supply Chain simulation, at least one of us miss-understood that we were given two years of historical data…including lost product data based upon a production and shipping plan. Miss-understanding that data lost time in having the opportunity to digest the data that we had! Another aspect of miss-understanding that data was that we didn’t realize that we had the option of NOT doing anything to our production or shipment schedules; there was a default plan in place that we could have stuck with.

But, a person can have perfect data, develop a great plan, but fail because they can’t enact the plan! In the case of this simulation, not knowing for the first couple of simulation “days” how to tell the factory to ship product lost us production time, shipping costs and lost sales-opportunities. Then once we experimented with the system in place, we had a hard time understanding what we were telling the factory to do. This comes down to understanding the system and knowing how to communicate orders to the factory workers.

Another key point: implementing the timing of the production with the forecast data.

We invested early in our production capabilities and doubled it. Unfortunately we were not able to effectively capitalize on it as shown by our Lost Shipments. We didn’t decrease the number of shipments we lost… so what did we learn from this simulation run, that many problems that cause a company to be noncompetitive can be directed at the manufacturing function of poor quality and reliability, late deliveries, high manufacturing cost, and the lack of proper inventory at the right place.

We failed at producing an efficient supply chain by not reducing...