The Beer Game

“Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning/ Born of the one light, Eden saw play/ Praise with elation, praise every morning/God's recreation of the new day.” ~Cat Stevens, Morning Has Broken

March 4, 2013

I woke up about 30 minutes before I needed to this morning so I could review my notes for Intro to Czech. I’d created some flashcards of basic questions (“What is your name?” “Do you like Prague?” etc.) and I ran through them briefly. Our professor had also given us a few exercises in the text book to do and I penciled in the answers quickly.

As I finished the exercises, I grabbed a yogurt of the refrigerator for breakfast. I rushed around to get my things and got dressed. I debated rather or not I should take my laptop with me to school so I could proofread my blog posts between classes, but I decided against it. Shoving my notebooks into my backpack, I grabbed my jacket. That was when I noticed something out the window…

A cloudless blue sky!

I stood by the window staring at it for a few minutes before realizing I needed to get to class. Outside, it wasn’t necessarily warm, but it felt like springtime. The entire tram ride to school looked different. It was as if the sunlight had turned Prague into a completely new city.

I got to class and continued to stare out the window. As with the previous two weeks, our professor was late so I had time to take pictures and daydream about the sunshine. When she did arrive, the daydreaming didn’t really stop.

In class we learned quite a bit of Czech. In addition to learning the remaining question words (“what” “how” etc.) we also learned about 10 adjectives. Suddenly, we could form sentences and have conversations. They were primitive (“How is the park?” “It is nice”) but it was a start.

We also got a list of vocabulary words and went around the room practicing them. She would ask us—in Czech—where something was and we would respond. She asked me where the “ulice” was. The word for “here” is easy to remember; it’s “tady.” I replied. “Ta ulice jse tady” (the ‘ulice’ is here.)

“Really?” she asked. “It is in here?”

I looked down at my sheet. I realized that “ulice” was Czech for “street or freeway.”

I laughed and so did everyone else. “Ta ulice is tam,” I said pointing out the window. (The street is over there.)

After Czech, I has part one of my Supply Chain Management class. It was again hard to concentrate with the new sunshine.  My ears did perk up when I heard my professor say, “After lunch, we will be playing beer game in the second half of seminar.”

Everyone erupted into questions and some of the American students commented on how awesome school was in Europe.

I decided to save some money and went home for lunch. Back in the dorm, I made a sandwich for lunch. I worked some more on my blog posts about Dresden, but the time flew by and I soon had to head back to school.

When I got there, I went right back to staring out the window. I wasn’t even casual about it. I could have been in a scene out of Dead Poet Society just blatantly taking in the scenery and oblivious to everything in the classroom. I was so oblivious that I didn’t realize the professor was over 30 minutes late coming back from the break. When he arrived he explained the Beer Game.

The game was basically a simulation of a supply chain for a beer company. There were two teams of six, with one person being the customer, one the retailer, one the wholesaler, one the distributer and two people as the producer. Each round the customer would draw a card indicating the number of beers he was purchasing (simulating a demand). Prior to knowing the demand, the retailer would write down a prediction and pass it onto the wholesaler. The wholesaler wrote a prediction for the distributor, and the distributor wrote one for the producer. The producers made a prediction for themselves. The cards would then all be flipped and scores recorded based on if the overall net demand across the supply chain was positive or negative. In the next round, points carried over so if the previous score was negative, those points had to be made up before a positive score was obtained.

The game was meant to simulate the “Bullwhip Effect” and I think it did quite well. I played the role of the producer and our score was all over the place. We’d go from way in the positive to way in the negative.

“Do good predicting,” one of my team mates from Sweden said.

“Oh don’t worry,” I said. “I’m an American. We play to win.”

He laughed and said, “I have noticed this about your people.”

We won’t find out the final scores until next week, but I’m not overly optimistic.

Walking back to the tram, the sun was still up. The days are definitely getting longer and warmer and I love it!

I finished my paper when I got home. Afterwards, I Skyped again with Bryan. “It’s not a great paper,” I told him. “Heck it’s probably one of the worst things I’ve ever written. I used Wikipedia as two of my seven sources.” But I sent it off to Karin and Eli to get incorporated with the rest of our project.

After making pasta for dinner, I continued working on the blog posts from Dresden. Every time I re-read them, I remembered more and more detail to add. After working on them for a few hours, I gave up, took a shower, and went to bed.