The most eye-opening thing for me was that a good quarter of students were frustrated and surprised by the bullwhip effect. I'd guess the general population would be even less understanding of a bullwhip effect. I think that help explains why it seems so many people don't understand why it's difficult, even for the U.S. federal government, to create more supply of hand sanitizer, respirators, etc.
P.S. To be clear: I'm not suggesting the federal government isn't to blame for a lack of supply - we should have had a larger strategic reserve of pandemic mitigating supplies prior to the crisis, if only due to the risk of biological weapons (those preparations would have been just about as useful in a non-human-caused pandemic like COVID-19). Nor am I saying the government can't do more right now. The Beer Distribution Game merely helps partially demonstrate why manufacturers, suppliers, and the government (especially if they themselves understand the bullwhip effect!) don't instantly will pandemic supplies into existence.
A nasty thing, this bullwhip effect.
you deal those with scenario planning, which might be the sole responsibility of pandemic unit. We use casual loop diagrams to understand effects when math cant be drawn out on abstract problems.
Its insanely expensive to satisfy 99% populations requirement versus 95% of populations requirement but when that happens and if the consequence are severe we manage those supply chains with redundancy and the costs are absorbed with other players. Sure, it would profitable to operate without this but my understanding is when this sh*t hits everything falls.
$15 billion savings in 2018 resulted in $12 trillion being wiped out in two weeks.
>https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...
>https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market...
Production hand sanitizer and masks and such is being ramped up, now that Chinese factories are slowly going back online. Things like that take some time, so.
Sure, I’ll just work a few extra hours to grow the crop of plants we extract this drug from.
Or build some more vats that we brew this drug in.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert
Players are crew members of a 6-room ship, equipped with weapons and generators supplying power (ammo) - all operated manually.
Each round consists of a planning and execution phase. During the former players listen to a pre-recorded track of incoming threats and declare their actions.
In the latter phase the threats start to arrive and the previously planned actions are executed.
The difficulty here is that the planning phase is timed, so the team has to communicate efficiently.
A single bad decision of a single player may doom the whole team, especially that players can and will get in the way of each other.
I remember doing just that - instead of going to the generator, spending a unit of fuel to charge it and distributing power to the turrets I picked the wrong decision card which moved me back from where I started, so my pawn was pressing the right buttons, but in the wrong room.
To make matters worse on my way back I got in the way of my teammate(and informal captain) and prevented him from recharging the generator later, which was important, because our turretwoman was supposed to be firing all the time.
The aliens destroyed that part of the ship killing her and leaving us defenseless.
https://beergame.opexanalytics.com/#/ https://opexanalytics.com/beergame/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Discipline
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Or...
Causal loop diagrams are basically toys, useful only during initial hypothesis formation. You need a stock-and-flow model to actually test and elaborate your hypothesis.
The best all-round introductory book I have read in this area is still Sterman's Business Dynamics. 1st edition hardbacks are out of print, but there are second-hand copies and also cheap international editions around. A 2nd edition is expected next year.
However, I stand by the assertion that it is a worthy read. I gained a lot from reading it, and if it falls short of being totally comprehensive and standing entirely on its own... well, that's a criticism that would apply to many books.
All of that said, thanks for mentioning the Sterman book. I wasn't familiar with it, and I'm about to order a copy.
> Free return policies: Customers may overstate demands due to shortages, if customers cannot returns items, retailers will continue to exaggerate their needs, cancelling orders and causing in excess product or materials.
I was annoyed when I saw that stores were refusing to accept returns, thinking that they didn't want to suffer the cost of regretful hoarders trying to make right. Most people I talked to were pleased that hoarders were getting their comeuppance. But its effect on supply went completely over my head, and while I don't know if anyone else was aware, certainly nobody mentioned it.
and still there will be bullwhips because the future contains uncertainties like "when is the next coronavirus outbreak?"
Silicon Valley operates on secrets (what do Google Amazon and Facebook do with your data? anything that is not simply further stacking the deck against you?) the elimination of which is the direction reform minded people should go with regulations.
1. Push all the inventory to the end of the supply chain (the retailer).
2. Run the inside of the supply chain on a "pass-through" strategy - order exactly what is known to be coming down the supply chain on that turn.
3. Use a control algorithm based on the outflows from the retailer to control production at the factory (the factory player has to watch the retailer's inventory closely). The best parameters for the control system depend on the exact demand deck.
Could easily be updated to the N95 mask game. Especially given what I was reading about melt blown production lines capacity and initial install costs.
Of course this makes the game interesting and also explains why in real life the only sustainable model for economy is planning. The planning starts from actually measuring/calculating the real demand. Then you model your whole supply chain. Of course this means the state has to have control over and complete understanding. This is hard science http://www.strategplan.com/en/
Also, this allows planning measures for emergency cases like epidemics, war and other disasters.
It's impossible to achieve that with monetary approach.
"real life" planned economies have done terribly so far, while price-based capitalist economies seem to have done a lot better.
>The planning starts from actually measuring/calculating the real demand.
Herein lies the problem. How do you measure "real demand" for an entire economy, without prices? Prices convey information about what is really in demand at a given time and without them it's remarkably difficult to get answers that don't involve guesswork or individuals demanding more than they really need.
Out of curiosity: did you try to look up the answer to your question before asking it here?
In fact, I'd say that PID's that are functioning most efficiently are very nearly tuned to the point of oscillating. Even worse is the kinds of adjustments you have to make to PID's when there is significant lag between their inputs and outputs.
You can extract more performance out of a system by having a very good predictive model of it and measuring its inputs: This can really improve how you drive the system but it's much more difficult to achieve, and you're still limited by how quickly information moves through the system in terms of how you can react.
A major insight of the field is that lags due to accumulation create wildly unexpected behaviours in systems that humans try to control. Many automated systems struggle too.
