In a recent lecture, we were looking at the mathematics in global food supply and demand planning. We started off by looking at the mathematics behind global food supply chain. It is a well-known fact that food is transported all around the world from country to country, but I had never stopped and thought about how much must be considered prior to transportation especially mathematically. There are many mathematical concepts to be considered in food transportation such as mass, distribution of mass, size, strength, temperature requirements and distance travelled i.e. for shelf life. Shape also plays a large part in food transportation for packing vans/ships etc. There are many things that must be considered such as the shape of each box and the best way to fit them all together. Also, the type of item that is being shipped i.e. eggs, heavy items could not be placed on top of these. In order to do this there must be some basic understanding of shape and what shapes fit best together. There also must be some understanding of weight to ensure no items become broken or squashed.

We also looked at demand planning. So, what is demand planning? It is used to predict/forecast businesses future sales (Demand Planning, 2016.) As a class, we were put to the test and asked to create our own business plan. We had to pick 5 items out of a list of 15 and had to decide what we thought would sell best. We were given £5000 to start off with. The business plan was from January to December. Once we had picked our items we were given further instructions which told us the success rate of those products and if we lost or gained money. This was the rule for throughout the game. It was a challenging task to say the least! It took a lot of getting in to and a bit of time to understand it. It was beneficial however as it allowed us to see for ourselves how exactly demanding planning works and everything that must be taken in to consideration. We had to consider how many items we had not sold, shelf-life, the money we would lose if we could not sell these items and at what time of year was best for products. Me and my partner started off well however we managed to lose a fair amount of money and although we finished with more than we started with it was far off some other teams. There are many aspects of mathematics involved in demand planning such as problem solving skills, data handling, money and basic equations.

There are elements of Liping Ma’s four characteristics both within global food supply and demand planning.

Basic Ideas; In order to understand demand planning we had to be able to work with basic equations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We also had to have basic problem solving skills and handling money.

Connectedness; Global food supply has connections with other mathematical topics such as tessellation. Tessellation is when many regular shapes fit together (Eastaway and Askew, 2013, p195.) This also applies to shipping food. Those who pack the ship must make sure all the shapes fit together to get all the items on board.

Multiple Perspectives: This applies to the demand planning. As the class was split in pairs, each pair had a different approach to the demand planning. Some tried to be tactical with their buying whereas others chose to buy large amounts of food. We each tackled it differently and all had different reasons as to why but were able to discuss which methods worked best in comparison to others.

References

Demand Planning (2016) Available at: http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/definition/demand-planning [Accessed on 29 November 2016]

Ma., L (2010) Knowing and teaching elementary mathematics. New York and London: Routledge.