Custom «Electronic Commerce» Essay Paper Sample

Beer Game:

This is a game developed at MIT in the 1960s and it involves a simple production and distribution system for a brand of beer and three players are involved namely the retailer, wholesaler and the marketing director. The objective of every player is to maximize profit.

The beer is delivered to the retailer by a truck on weekly basis which he then places an order which the trucker returns to he wholesaler who there is no direct communication. Retailer sells hundreds of products while the wholesaler does a distribution of many products to a very larger number of customers (Ritschelova & Capek 2009). The game is intended to teach dynamics and make its participants to be aware how independent businesses take supply chains related decisions.

Beer game is good tool for demonstrating bullwhip effect because the game engages participants in emotional variations like frustration and helplessness and end up blaming teammates resulting to heated arguments. This leads to reduction in the retailer inventory levels, followed by the wholesalers, inventories and finally distributors and factory. This decline leads to increased orders and stock out as backlogs of unfilled orders grows. Faced with rising orders and large backlogs orders placed with their suppliers are dramatically boosted by the players resulting to large brewing and shipment by the factory leading to surging of inventory levels (Groven Et al. 2008).

One of the limitations of using beer game to measure the bullwhip effect is that unlike the human players, computer players are not binded by the cognitive human nature hence tend to perform better. In addition to that the interaction with numbers appearing on a screen instead of physical representation of precuts reduces the perception of the magnitude f the orders and the building up of the inventory which contribute to tangible bullwhip effect.

Yes the beer game simplifies the interactions that exist in real supply chains as it involves the entire process of supply in right from the producer to the retailer and illustrates all the challenges faced and possible solutions to tackling the problems leading to profitable and sustainable supply chains. The game tends to overly simplifies the complexities that are actually encountered in supply chain and makes it appear an easy task to perform yet it's involves very complicated interactions relating to high stock levels, poor customer service, poor capacity utilization, demand forecasting and low levels of inter-firm trust.

Data Sharing in E-government.

E-government is something to be supported because it allows services to be offered to citizens through the government portals which serve to provide information and supports various citizen government transactions. E-government through the reaction of information data boxes guarantees a secure method to publish official announcements and process applications for government offices, business enterprises and citizens (Riemer, 2009). In order to for e-government to succeed and be effective I n the management of common data i.e. information which cover all the citizens as well as enterprises life events) social, economic among others). This type of information should be made available to the citizens while at same time considering the complying with authorization, identification ad integrity and privacy of its users.

Some of the potential issues surrounding privacy in the e-government include the problem of secure preservation of such electronic documents. To curb the problem creation of information data boxes can serve a secure way to make official announcements and applications as it reduces bureaucracy for the citizens as well as increasing the usage of the electronic delivery rather than the classical physical delivery system (Epractice, 2009). This system allows the owner to be notified when there is a new message as well as presented with freedom to choose a preferred form of notification.