Root Beer Simulation Paper

During the Root Beer Simulation, I was assigned the role of the Retailer which means I was in the center of the supply chain. My job was to essentially guess what the customers would need four weeks into the future and order accordingly. Normally, this would be fine, however, in the simulation we did not know the other members of our chain or have any sort of prediction model. Due to the unknown of what the factory, the distributer, and the wholesaler would do this became a quite difficult process that involved a lot of backlog which caused for an increase in expenses for my part of the supply chain. During the first three weeks, the consumer demand stayed relatively low at fifty thousand. However, in the fourth week the consumer demand doubled. This was not something that I expected and I had not ordered enough product for this substantial increase. Therefore, in the future, I ordered a little bit more on some occasions just in case there would be another substantial increase. However, this increase in case of substantial changes in demand was never actually necessary. For the rest of the rounds, demand stayed at one hundred thousand.
Unfortunately, my hope to prepare for more demand caused the issue of backlog. I was backlogged …show more content…
Many times, I became frustrated because the factory kept letting the time run out. Eventually, the factory started to become more on top of the situation. However, then the wholesaler would not be paying attention and also let the time run out. Without being able to contact the different parts of the supply chain, I found that the whole chain was left completely ineffective. This ineffectiveness, of course, then resulted in the added expense for all of us. Overall, I truly believe that being able to communicate with the rest of my supply chain, then we would have been able to resolve these