Myself and Jenny found that we were quite good at this activity…
Demand Planning and Logistics
This activity was an interesting one for me. We paired up and had to complete the activity, based around demand planning. To explain what demand planing is, I found this video was really good at explaining it:
Basically it is planning ahead how much stock an organisation is going to sell so that there is enough stock available to sell so as to make as much profit as possible. Obviously that is a really simplified explanation, but that is what it is.
We got into pairs and were given a spreadsheet to fill in. We were given €5,000, and had to run a shop. We had to plan what would sell depending on the season and how much of it we should buy. Each season we were told how much of our products had sold and at what price and we then had to decide what to buy more of and what to stop buying.
The mathematics involved was not difficult, but it did require a lot of thought. Some people lost money by ordering the wrong products, such as Christmas selection boxes in the summer season, or ice-cream wafers in the winter season. We also had the option of buying ‘Premium Durian’, which only ever sold around 10-20%, and was therefore not a good buy as it would cost more to purchase than the profit made on them when sold. Also available were items such as beans, bananas and milk, which always sold at a minimum of 70%.
The maths was not the arithmetic involved, we had calculators and it was mostly very simple addition and subtraction. The real mathematics was in the patterns that began to form. It took some of us a a little while to understand this, but we had to be able to see that, for example, bread sales were always high, so investing in bread was a good idea as it always sold, whereas the durian did not sell or only sold very little. Of course it was important to look at the selling price of certain seasonal items in each season, as when it dropped suggested that it was not going to sell as well.
From a teaching perspective this was interest to consider, as on the face of it, it seems to be fairly complicated. However, the more I considered the activity, the more I thought it was one that I may try with children. I think that it could be done as a mathematics activity, but also a business one. It also occurred to e that this could be a really good activity to have children engage in cooperative learning and good to encourage them to take on group roles. I also think that it could be adapted and used in almost any class topic, maybe running a school or a zoo or maybe a park. I think that it would require a lot of build up and the children in the class would need to be given a lot of support. but it is definitely an activity I would try in the future.
