The Savvy Leader’s Guide to Building an Intelligent Supply Chain

In the late 1950s, MIT professor Jay Forrester invented the Beer Game, a simple table game that simulates the incredibly complex task of getting a product from factory to consumer.

In the Beer Game, every link in the supply chain is a small business. If one link in the chain fails, everything can come crashing down domino style. Decades later, that core idea remains essentially unchanged. In Forrester’s simulation, which does not allow communication between participants, there was often frustration among the players at the realisation that they could only control their small segment of the supply chain.1 And the same is true today when different facets of a distribution network are unable to communicate with each other effectively and efficiently.