How to (not to) run a factory: My Littlefield Simulation experience

In the past month, my team and I had the opportunity to participate in a Littlefield simulation competition. Here’s a introduction:

From its website,

Littlefield is an online competitive simulation of a queueing network with an inventory point. .. a high-tech factory named Littlefield Technologies. In a typical setting, students are divided into teams, and compete to maximize their cash position through decisions: buying and selling capacity, adjusting lead time quotes, changing lot sizes and inventory ordering parameters, and selecting scheduling rules.

I’ll be going through the outline of the simulation, our overall strategy and what we learned from going from 3rd place to the last place ⬇

Outline of the simulation

Overall strategy

Lessons learned (from mistakes made)

Always stick to the plan and monitor constantly.

Apart from the numerous small mistakes, we made one fatal mistake that cost us $300,000~ in losses.

• We forgot to change the ReorderPoint to zero on Day 220.
• Furthermore, the OrderQuantity was set at the bulk order quantity, which is 33,480 kits (normal OrderQuantity is 15,000~ kits).

These meant that the system will launch another big bulk order in the middle of the period where we had no control over the system and was near to the end of the simulation. Essentially, the system will wipe out our cash balance and our plan for inventory to run out perfectly at the end of the simulation had gone to ruins.

This caused a huge order to arrive on Day 250 and essentially “wasting” our cash balance on inventory that would not have been used to generate revenue.

Actual final cash balance vs predicted final cash balance if we had changed the reorder point to zero.

Although we were leading in most of the duration of the simulation, we failed to cross check and ensure that we were following the plan.

Future Improvements

We have thought of some ways to improve our execution.

One could be going into the system a few days before a projected inventory reorder to verify that the set reorder point and quantity are accurate.

Another would be cross-checking between members. This reduces communication errors and ensures that everybody is clear about the overview of the system. We could have logged which members executed each change and which member cross checked for accountability and to reduce effects of human error.

That’s it for my experience! if you’re interested in the full report, have a look here.

Have a great day! 🤡

Update (15/4/2024)

If you would like to have a structured learning approach to this game, do check out graduatetutor HERE.