When I first noticed we had a three hour slot of math today I was absolutely dreading it. However the three hours actually went buy so quickly. We were looking into demand planning and how it is used in businesses and the math behind it. I have worked in the hospitality industry before, therefore have had the opportunity to look into stock and how it works, and it was not until now that I realised the huge amount of math that is actually behind it and ensuring it is done correctly.

In the input today we were given the chance to work in pairs and “run our own business.” We were in charge of the order of stock for a whole year. The rules included that we could only buy 5 types of products at a time. Because of this we had to look at the time of year and decide what type of products we thought would sell the most, therefore earning the most money. for example in December we bought selection boxes, and in July we bought ice cream wafers.

After we made the decision with the products we had to find out the percentage of them that sold and calculate this to see how much of a profit we made. It required a lot of concentration and few of us did end up quite frustrated however the math behind it was countless and this was not made clear until after the first month of doing it.

In the end we got to see how successful we were through our overall profit starting from £5000.

This exercise I felt was a tough one, though it is one that I would like to do again. It is the perfect exercise I feel to show how math is used within the wider world and also how different topics within math are connected. It is also good for the repetition used throughout it as you are constantly having to do certain equations over and over again, therefore reinforcing them.

On a whole, I feel like this input today was very beneficial and actually quite shocking on how much math was used within this one simple task.