I’ve never understood how you win the beer distribution game, people only ever talk about the effects on the supply chain it seems. But how do you mitigate?
Communication, as soon as people are allowed to exchange information, results get a lot better. Teams can start planning, based on real customer demand,backlogs and so on. This changes everything.
which makes perfect sense because among the assumptions of free market economics which are required to make the invisible hand do its work is "perfect information": buyers and sellers share perfect information about conditions, costs, markets, supply, demand, etc.
and still there will be bullwhips because the future contains uncertainties like "when is the next coronavirus outbreak?"
Silicon Valley operates on secrets (what do Google Amazon and Facebook do with your data? anything that is not simply further stacking the deck against you?) the elimination of which is the direction reform minded people should go with regulations.
I wrote a paper on what we thought was the optimal strategy for the beer game. My team won a beer game session run at the system dynamics society conference about 10 years ago.
1. Push all the inventory to the end of the supply chain (the retailer).
2. Run the inside of the supply chain on a "pass-through" strategy - order exactly what is known to be coming down the supply chain on that turn.
3. Use a control algorithm based on the outflows from the retailer to control production at the factory (the factory player has to watch the retailer's inventory closely). The best parameters for the control system depend on the exact demand deck.
If that turns out to be th solution, the game was played based on wrong assumptions. You have to measure inventorylevels as well, the solution is to define, across perticipants, the amount that has to be produced based on customer demand (simulated by the trainer/ facilitator).