The Bullwhip Effect
How a quiet week at the register becomes a crisis at the glass plant
Consumer demand for a brand rarely moves more than a few per cent week to week. Orders on the material suppliers behind that brand move by half. Nobody decided that should happen: each tier forecasts off the orders it receives rather than off the shelf, then adds a lead time, a safety stock rule and a minimum order quantity of its own.
This runs that arithmetic. The whip view puts the chain itself on the horizontal axis, so a single week's wobble travels left to right and grows as it goes. Amplification and delay stop being two separate charts. The three-tier system makes both worse, because a producer is not permitted to see the till.
Set the conditions, watch it travel
Fifty-two weeks. The demand series is seeded from the parameters, so moving one slider shows you the effect of that slider rather than a fresh set of noise.