Near Beer Game Review - Understanding Supply Chain Coordination

The Near Beer Game is a business simulation game that helps understand the complexities of supply chain coordination. Read this review to learn how to balance production and inventory to meet customer demands.

Near Beer Game Review
The beer game is a role-playing business simulation game intended to show centre standards of
the administration of supply chains. It portrays the present reality of the supply chain situation in
that it involves different related stages. The means include a retailer who needs to satisfy the
requests of the end buyer, the distributor who needs to satisfy the requests of the retailer; the
merchant who should meet the distributer's requests and the production line. The industrial
facility's assignment is to create the beer to satisfy the request from the wholesaler. The game
forbids correspondence and coordinated effort subsequently bringing about the formation of a
'bullwhip impact'. The beer game symbolizes the more complicated supply chain coordination’s
where, even though there may be a steady customer order demands, little changes sought after at
the retail end of the chain can significantly cause a big problem in upstream supply chains. As a
result, a scope of wasteful aspects happens in the supply chain that exhibits supply chain
coordination issues.
The game starts with my goal well set. My goal was to match my finished goods inventory to
total customer orders and balance my production pipeline. I was given 50 weeks to succeed in
achieving my goal. I was supposed to submit raw material orders which move through the
production pipeline to fulfil my customers’ orders.
Finished goods inventory contains the number of beer cases that are available to ship to my
customers.

Total orders from customers – This includes the new orders from customers in a given week
plus the cumulative unfilled orders (all orders that I have not been able to fulfil in the past
weeks).
Shipments to customers - Total orders from my customers, is shipped if there are enough beer
cases in the finished goods inventory.
I started the game by making a few orders for the raw materials in a given week, and then ended
up having a finished goods inventory that had no enough number of cases. As a result, I was not
able to fulfil both the new and the backlogged orders since I had an insufficient number of beer
cases. This represents how complex supply chain can end up being since the week I am ordering
for raw materials is not the same week I will deliver them to my customers. I was taking orders
for raw materials using the current trend only for the future trend to change.

Now, this is where it got even trickier, at week 2, I had so many orders to fulfil (both new orders
and backlogged customer orders) and yet the finished goods inventory had insufficient cases to
ship to customers. In response to this scenario I decided to order a lot of raw materials then at
week 7 (as shown above), I ended up having a lot of cases in the finished goods inventory and
very few total customer orders to fulfil.
At Week 17, I realised the mistake I had made in requesting for a lot of raw materials which
resulted in a lot of cases at the finished goods inventory. I decided to start reducing the order

requests for more raw materials. I cut these to zero for some weeks until my finished goods
inventory matched the customer orders at week 23. After achieving this status, I had hit my goal
for the near beer game.