LittleField Report
LittleField
(1) What was your initial strategy and how/why did you change your strategy during the game?. (2) Which concepts that you learned in this course did you apply in making your decisions? Explain. (3) What did you learn from the game?
General Strategy
Getting into the game our strategy was to identify the bottleneck in the process and maximize its utilization. We were aiming to balance our stock so a new stock will arrive every 4 days, and the current stock will not run out (but will get close to 0). On the contract level, we wanted to examine by how much we can cut the lead time in order to improve the contact.
About 10 “game days” into the simulation, we realized there’s no cost of stocking, yet there’s a cost for the shipment. At that point we decide to increase the order size rapidly throughout the game as much as we can, till we have enough stock for the last 100.
Since the interest on the money was so low (10% a year), we realized it won’t be a dramatic factor we need to take into consideration. For example, if we had started the game with $1M and kept it, we would have addition $100,000 (not a significant amount as we estimated our final revenue to be around $1.2M). Since most of the gave we gain interest on a revenue much lower than $1M, all our decisions ignored the potential interest we could receive by saving cash by ordering less materials or not buying machines.
We also saw no point in reducing the lot size to below 60 units. While steps 1, 2 and 4 were constant on manufacturing time per unit, step 2 saved manufacturing time per unit when dealing with bigger quantities. Hence, we didn’t see any advantage in producing smaller lots.
Machines
Right off the bat we noticed Station 2 is the bottleneck as it functioned both as step 2 and step 4 of the process, and we only had 1 machine on this station. We recognized the utilization is constantly 1 and queue 2 is building up. Therefore we decided to purchase another machine to the station. We figured
(1) What was your initial strategy and how/why did you change your strategy during the game?. (2) Which concepts that you learned in this course did you apply in making your decisions? Explain. (3) What did you learn from the game?
General Strategy
Getting into the game our strategy was to identify the bottleneck in the process and maximize its utilization. We were aiming to balance our stock so a new stock will arrive every 4 days, and the current stock will not run out (but will get close to 0). On the contract level, we wanted to examine by how much we can cut the lead time in order to improve the contact.
About 10 “game days” into the simulation, we realized there’s no cost of stocking, yet there’s a cost for the shipment. At that point we decide to increase the order size rapidly throughout the game as much as we can, till we have enough stock for the last 100.
Since the interest on the money was so low (10% a year), we realized it won’t be a dramatic factor we need to take into consideration. For example, if we had started the game with $1M and kept it, we would have addition $100,000 (not a significant amount as we estimated our final revenue to be around $1.2M). Since most of the gave we gain interest on a revenue much lower than $1M, all our decisions ignored the potential interest we could receive by saving cash by ordering less materials or not buying machines.
We also saw no point in reducing the lot size to below 60 units. While steps 1, 2 and 4 were constant on manufacturing time per unit, step 2 saved manufacturing time per unit when dealing with bigger quantities. Hence, we didn’t see any advantage in producing smaller lots.
Machines
Right off the bat we noticed Station 2 is the bottleneck as it functioned both as step 2 and step 4 of the process, and we only had 1 machine on this station. We recognized the utilization is constantly 1 and queue 2 is building up. Therefore we decided to purchase another machine to the station. We figured