Littlefield Game Assignment Responsiveness

 Littlefield Game Assignment #2

Responsiveness

Emilie Rowe 200821692

Lindsay Baird  200829448

Problem Statement

For our second Littlefield simulation game, we were tasked with continuing to appropriately run the newly opened factory that produced Digital Satellite Systems (DSS) for retail sale. It was quite similar to the last simulation, however in the “Customer Responsiveness” game, we could choose between three different contracts. Each contract outlined prices and lead times for our customers. Customers were willing to pay higher prices for lower lead times. Teams were able to switch back and forth between contracts through the entirety of the game. It was our responsibility to determine which contract our team was able to support through having the appropriate amount of kits on hand and products produced in the given contract time.

Our Actions

We knew we had to act immediately this time when it came to assessing our situation in the game and updating machinery, reorder points and contracts when the game began. We wanted to ensure that we were as successful so we tried to begin as close to noon on the Friday as possible. We used data from the first 50 days of operations to begin our strategizing.  We saw that we were already running out of kits after the 50 initial days had been run, so we immediately upped our reorder point from 24 kits to 40 kits. We did this without any calculations because we wanted to remedy the issue of stocking out of kits before any more money was lost. We then needed to determine what our average demand was for our DSS product was. We calculated our average demand to be 12.28 (639/52), which was the demand for the product on each day divided by the number of days that had passed.

With this information we then determined that we needed to formulate a linear trend line of the data in order to forecast what future demand would be. The forecast equation we used was Yt = a + bt. To construct the forecast we had to determine the slope  (b) and the intercept (a). From the given data the demand on day 0 was 0, and about the same on day 1, so we assumed that the intercept (a) would = 0. We then moved on to the calculation of the slope. We used the help of excel to determine the slope and then in turn we determined a trend forecast using a regression slope function.

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We made a column numbered 1 to 52 labeled it X and then made a column labeled Y with the corresponding demand data given in the game for the same days. With that, we were then able to calculate the slope, and we found our forecast equation to be y=-0.0263x +12.984 . We also found from excel that the standard deviation to be 3.637153263.

Next we found the lead time to be 4 days and we chose 3 as our safety factor. We then determined our order point to be (12.3x4 + 2x3.64x3)=71 kits. We then quickly changed our order point to 71 kits.