Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The (Board) Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management Part XVII: The Village

Life is tough in Competitive Co. Global growth is slowing with the economy. Your products are no longer the most wanted in the marketplace. And at the end of every quarter, the employees who fall in the bottom 10% of their performance reviews get axed. Plus, you just found out that the CPO has been lured away to Big Money Co., one of the Directors is getting promoted, and it’s likely that the next Director will be promoted from within. You want that job, because it significantly decreases the chance that you will be cut when your next annual performance review comes up.

But how do you progress up the corporate ladder? Where do you focus your efforts? Even though you’re required to be a jack of all trades as a Category Manager, you can’t focus on everything, and if you’ll try, you’ll be a master of none and one of your category management rivals will be picked instead of you. Looking around, you see that people who get promoted to Senior Management positions tend to be those who either excel in timing the market and locking in contracts and/or spot buys at the perfect time, forging new markets, managing supplier relationships to optimize production, embedding themselves in standards organizations, or mastering the politics of the workplace to advance despite their lack of skills.

It’s not much different than trying to progress up the social ladder in the typical medieval village. If you were unhappy with the simple life of a farmer (like in Agricola) or a fisherman (like in Le Havre or Rouen Upon a Salty Ocean), then you either have to make your life as a merchant in the market and learn how to profit on every trade, travel to strange new lands to find new and valuable goods for trade, become a master craftsman and produce the ploughs and carriages needed by the farmers and traders, take the religious path and join the church and try to become a monk and work your way up the pecking order, or, if you were lucky to be living in one of the early commonwealths or states, where leaders were elected, become a politician and try to work your way up the ranks in the city council to eventually become elected (or appointed) as the representative of your city.

In other words, things haven’t changed much in 300 years. If you want to get ahead in the world, you either master trade, travel, craft, religion*, or politics. And that’s what you have to do in The Village.
In The Village, you win by controlling the family that achieves the most prestige by the end of the game. Prestige is gained by traveling to new cities, occupying the council chamber(s), progressing through the ranks in the church, succeeding in trade at the market, amassing wealth (in the form of gold coins), and getting your family members recorded in the village chronicle (for their deeds) on their demise. (Unlike the other worker-based games we have covered so far in this Board Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management, where you either have a constant number of workers, or a slowly increasing number of workers as the game progresses, in this game, you lose workers as the game progresses as actions have a time element, and you only get so much time per worker. This adds a new dimension of complexity as you have to be balance worker acquisition with worker loss, just like in the real world where workers retire, defect, or, occasionally, drop dead at their desks.)

As with most worker placement games, the game is round-based and each round consists of a number of actions. In each round, there are a fixed number of birthing, grain harvest, craft, market, travel, council, church, and well actions and players take turns until all the actions have been taken or the end-game has been triggered (in which case each player takes one more action). The birthing action adds one family member (worker) to your family; the grain harvest allows you to take 2 (3, or 4) bags of grain (if you have a plow and a orse or an ox); the craft action allows you to either produce or trade for a scroll, plow, or wagon, mill grain and sell it for gold, or work or trade for a horse or ox; the market action allows you to trade goods (and acquire prestige for your trading skills); the travel action allows you to visit a new city if you have a wagon and the resources to do so; the council action allows you to place a member in the council if you have a scroll or the influence (resources) to do so or, if you have a member in the council, advance him through the ranks if you have the scroll and/or influence (resources) to do so and gain rewards for doing so; the church allows you to enroll one of your family members in the clergy in the hopes that they will be selected for advancement at the end of the round (which will give you prestige if you have the most family members in the clergy); and the well action allows you to acquire a resource (needed for travelling, council advancement, goods, etc.).

The difficulty is in balancing your actions so that you always have the resources and time to advance. For instance, you can’t take too many time-based actions until you have expanded your family as you lose one family member after you have taken actions that require 10 time units in total, and, because this game takes place during the time of the plague, you cannot add more than 7 family members over the duration of the game. Many of the actions, such as travel, advancing through the council chamber, trading in the market, milling grain for gold, and working for scrolls, ploughs, wagons, horses, and oxen, require time. Depending on the action, it can require anywhere from one time unit (to enter the council chambers for the first time) to six time units to produce your first plough (as it takes 3 time units to learn the trade and 3 time units to build a plough). Just like in the real world, it takes time for your workers to learn their jobs and then time to produce results. That’s why you often buy or outsource, trading money and material (in The Village, resources) for goods and services you need instead of trying to acquire the talent and build the product yourself. Some competencies (like category management) you invest in and others (like production) you outsource. Sometimes you keep a superstar on your team, and advance them through the ranks (like you advance them through the council or the church in The Village) and sometimes you let them go (or, in The Village, let them expire to be recorded in the Chronicle for prestige).

It’s another great game for testing your Supply Management muster, with the unique twist that you not only have to balance resources with growth, but you also have to balance trade with workforce output, because, just like in real life, if you burn out your workforce, they expire. Do you have what it takes to be master of The Village. Why don’t you find out? Maybe you’ll even figure out where to focus your efforts to advance your own Supply Management Career!

* Some standards have as many zealots as recognized religions!

The Board Gamers Guide to Supply Management Part XVI: The Rivals for Catan

You’re enthralled with (The Settlers of) Catan. Whether you are settling the uncharted islands of Catan or the uncharted planets in Star Trek Catan, you love acquiring your resources, negotiating the best trades, building your outposts and upgrading them into cities (in space), and sneaking your way to victory with a timely acquisition of the longest supply route or the largest force (with the occasional surprise victory point from a well-timed development). You really wish you could square off against the new guy one-on-one who thinks he is better than you, but (Star Trek) Catan is a 3 to 4 player game.

Fear not! Today Sourcing Innovation brings you the answer in its continuing guide to board games for (aspiring) supply management professionals. The answer is the two player variant called The Rivals for Catan, which was released on the 15th anniversary of the Catan Card Game, which was released shortly after the original release of The Settlers of Catan. (Which, low and behold, also comes in an iOS Version. It’s a good implementation and you will find that the tutorial in this game is also well done. However, while the doctor certainly prefers the iOS version of Le Havre for a one-on-one game, due to the significant amount of set up and tear down the board game requires, The Rivals for Catan is one game where the doctor definitely prefers the board game version if the circumstances permit.)

In Rivals of Catan, just as in The Settlers of Catan, you are trying to build your way to victory, which is achieved when you get to seven victory points in the base game or twelve victory points in an extended game (to be discussed at a later time). You receive one victory point for each village, two for each city (which is upgraded from a village), and one victory point each for the strength or trade advantage.

You build using the five standard resources of wood, brick, grain, wool, and ore, just as in regular Catan, but, if you get any, you can also take advantage of a sixth resource — gold — that can be traded for other resources you require. Resources are produced by a die roll at the start of each player’s turn, and the resource(s) that are produced are those produced by resource cards owned by the player which bare the number rolled, provided a player has enough room to store the resource. In Rivals for Catan, a resource card can only store 3 resources.

Each player starts the game with two villages, one road connecting them, and one production card for each resource. Each time he or she builds an additional village, she gets two more resource cards (if slots are available to hold them). In addition, if the player has a scout, he or she can choose what those resources are (instead of getting random resources). (A Scout is an expansion card.) However, she can only build a village if she has already built a road with an open end.

The big difference between Rivals For Catan and the Settlers for Catan, besides the fact that it is designed for 2 players, is that development cards are replaced with expansion cards (which can add buildings, ships, and heroes to your province) and success is highly dependent on strategic utilization of these cards. In the base game there are 36 expansion cards divided into 4 stacks. At the start of the game, each player takes 3 cards from the top of 1 card stack. These cards form the player’s hand and she can play them at any time on her turn if she has the resources and space to do so.

The expansion cards come in three forms: buildings (14), units (6 trade ships and 6 heroes), and 9 actions. The buildings generally increase resource production (such as the marketplace which gives you an extra resource if a production roll gives your opponent more resources than you), protect you resources (as the storehouse protects resources on neighbouring regions when the brigand is rolled), or enable progress (as each progress point given to you by a building allows you to hold one more card in your hand). Ships improve your trading ability with the bank (as the brick and grain ships, for example, will let you trade two to one instead of the base rate of three to one), and heroes contribute towards a strength or trade advantage (providing 1, 2 or 4 strength points and 1, 2, or 3 commerce points). The first player to reach 3 strength or commerce points has the strength or trade advantage until the other player exceeds the strength or commerce point total achieved by the first player to achieve the advantage. The actions allow you to trade 3 gold for 2 resources, trade (up to two) other resources one for one, choose the result of a production roll (like a Munchkin Loaded Die), relocate any two production regions or expansion cards, or Scout for resources of your choice.

Furthermore, to add more chaos to the mix, each production roll is accompanied by an event, determined by the event die. The event can be a plentiful harvest (which grants each player a resource of her choice), a celebration (which allows the player with the most skill points to receive 1 resource of her choice), a trade day (which allows the player with the trade advantage to receive 1 resource of her choice from her opponent), a brigand attack (which causes each player to lose all of her gold and wool if she has more than 7 resources), or a random event (drawn from the event stack). The random event could be a fraternal feud (which sees the player without the strength advantage losing two cards from her hand), a travelling merchant coming to town (that allows each player to trade gold for resources one-to-one, a year of plenty (which sees each player getting an extra resource for each storehouse and abbey in their province), a trade ships race (where the player with the most trade ships gets an extra resource), a feud (where the player without the strength advantage loses a building), or a new invention (that sees each player get a resource of his choice for each progress point he’s acquired). A lucky roll could see your province suddenly become resource rich and an unlucky roll will not only result in your province becoming resource poor compared to your opponent, but could also result in the destruction of a much needed building.

Remembering that we are Supply Chain Professionals doing business in the global marketplace, the first of us to secure and deliver all of the products and services we need to meet all of the customer demands wins the game. We secure the products and services we need by managing supply and reserving limited production and distribution capacity. We find out which resources are limited by watching the market and taking note of tumultuous events. In today’s marketplace, no supplier will be able to meet all of our component or service needs on their own, so we will not only have to barter and trade with multiple suppliers, but also with our competitors and their suppliers in tight markets. And there will be nasty surprises waiting for us. A natural disaster may wipe out part of the raw material supply or Somali pirates may seize a precious shipment. We hate the pirates. They are dicks. But if our shipments get robbed, it’s not the end of the world. There are other ways to serve our customers. We can use the insurance money to buy from someone else, we can redesign our products to use alternate materials, or we can focus on a new or different substitute product or service to get us, and our customers, through the worst of times.

And as The Rival for Catan, we are constantly trying to secure the resources we need to acquire our workers (heroes), construct our buildings, procure our ships, grow our company (to new villages and cities), and obtain strength and trade advantages over our competition. We have to do this in the midst of disaster (pirate attacks, what dicks!, civil uprisings, and legal injunctions [that take your resources from you]). And we have to take advantage of good fortune when the opportunity arises (and the market prices drop and we can trade [significantly] cheaper than normal).

The Rivals for Catan a great two-player game to sharpen your strategic supply management skills. Try it out. (And for extra practice, and training, try the iOS Version).

It’s Time to Bring Sexy Back to ERP!

ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, used to be sexy. Designed as an extension of MRP (initially Material Requirements Planning but later Manufacturing Resource Planning), it was designed to automate the back-office functions that did not directly affect customers and the general public and also include product planning, manufacturing control, and distribution in addition to the basic inventory control and production planning capability that was found in the precursor MRP technology.

But that was in the early days back in the nineties when design, manufacturing planning, and distribution planning was still largely paper-based. Then came the noughts with e-business, e-commerce, CRM, SRM, and e-Sourcing. Then ERP became boring old back office software that no one wanted to talk about. If you could afford the new fangled front-end systems, you were a Fortune 500 / Global 3000, you already had ERP, and there wasn’t much to talk about.

But now things have changed. The prices for e-business, e-commerce, CRM, SRM, and e-Sourcing have come down, the mid-market is starting to become saturated with basic “e-” functionality, and the new mid-market manufacturers and distributors need an ERP to take those orders, send those invoices, and manage the inventory they need to produce to meet your JIT inventory requirements. But, until now, they’ve had two choices — either fork out high six-plus figures for a stripped down version of Oracle or SAP (and the expertise to get it installed and integrated) which likely won’t meet all of their needs, or a custom implementation of an open source package such as Compiere, which probably won’t meet all of their needs either (but at least won’t cost them the virtual arm and leg). And neither solution is sexy.

As per SI’s recent post on how Mid-Market Manufacturers and Distributors Need an ERP That Works!, the solution needs to support the needs of the mid-market manufacturer, distributor, and even retailer. These needs include the need to deal with electronic purchase orders from customers, real-time demand planning and order management when customers inquire about availability and ship dates, inventory management, electronic purchase orders to your suppliers, automated invoices from your suppliers, and automated invoices to your customers. Without an ERP that gives them these capabilities, mid-market manufactures and distributors are left in the dark ages.

But if an ERP is to truly be effective, it not only has to provide you with these capabilities, but it has to be easy to use, which would make it appealing, and eliminate a lot of the manual data processing and tactical processes that organizations with traditional ERP systems tend to drown in, which would make it exciting. And if you want to get the new ERP system widely adopted, it should be glamorous, trendy, and even a little bit risqué. And that is the very definition of sexy.

Will ERP be sexy again?

Commercial Spam Turns 20 Today!


Some other time, some other place
We might not have been here, with egg on our face
I just wanna tell you, made up my mind
You know I can’t help the way I feel inside


Oh, this heart’s on fire
Right from the start, it’s been burning with rage
Oh, this heart’s on fire
One thing buddy, spam fills it with rampage!

And 20 years ago today, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel unleashed the “Green Card” spam upon the world. While this was not the first instance of Usenet spam, it was the first instance of commercial Usenet spam and, quoting Wikipedia, its unapologetic authors are seen as having set the precedent for the modern global practice of spamming.

Canter and Siegel sent their advertisement, with the subject “Green Card Lottery – Final One?”, to at least 5,500 Usenet discussion groups, which was a huge number at the time, posting it as a separate posting in each newsgroup so a reader would see it in every group they read. Their internet service provider, Internet Direct, received so many complaints that its mail servers crashed repeatedly for the next two days! You have to remember, this was back in the time of dial-up and the highest speed modems available at that time were fax-speed 14.4K modems, with most people still on 2,400 baud modems! But this effort, and their subsequent efforts through Cybersell, which was a “spam-for-hire” company, ushered in the age of spam that we are still dealing with to this day.