From Supply Chains to Supply Networks: the Beer Game evolution

The Beer Game is a didactic tool to simulate information and material flows along a supply chain from a factory to a retailer. The continuous evolution of inter-organisation configurations is challenging such a traditional concept of supply chain. Concepts more “market-oriented” are necessary to describe scenarios in which manufacturers operate as nodes of a network of cooperative or competitive suppliers, customers, and other specialised service functions. The aim of this paper is to propose and evaluate a new didactic tool and simulation, based on the rules of the Beer Game. The extension is based on a simple network joining two supply chains. Risk management is also simulated in order to understand the strategies underlying the subject’s behaviour in the face of risk within a means-end chain. This study describes the tests carried out on the original game, the variables that we proposed and the simulation results.