Help with 'The Beer Game' LO25840

From: Antonio Espín (aespin@campus.mor.itesm.mx)
Date: 01/03/01


Replying LO25837

Claire,

Best wishes for you and all org-learners.

I've had some experience with the beergame, and tought it may be of your
interest...

We have used the game either as a high school orientation tool for all
students interested on engineering and management, as well with people in
industry.

Once I had the oportunity to facilitate for a group of senior managers for
a Mexican diversified corporation (in fact one of their major business is
beer!), they were very interested in supply chain management sollutions,
one of the points they adressed was that, since they weren't able to
communicate with their supplier/costumer, they felt at a loss for valuable
information to decision making, which is one of the upsides of integrated
SCM sollutions. The session was wraped up by a Hewlett-Packard guy who
addresed on the relevant issues of having/using SCM systems.

One of the participant managers reflected on how important it is to
identify/plot trends (a model of the demand) that may serve as a decision
tool. It came up that the convenience store-final supply chain link on the
game- was the most important place to track demand, but seems to be (in
real life) the hardest place to obtain information from. This triggered a
discussion over the cost-benefit of implementing such a complex system.

If there is any other way I can help please let me know.

Jose-Antonio Espin
Head of Industrial Engineering Department
Tec de Monterrey-Campus Cuernavaca

-- 

Antonio =?iso-8859-1?Q?Esp=EDn?= <aespin@campus.mor.itesm.mx>

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