Practical Business Management: Strategy Business Game

Analyze the three products—tablets, laptops, and interactive whiteboards—and see how demand shifts driven by smartphones, two-in-one devices, and 50 percent annual growth call for separate pricing, investment, and production strategies.

Assess how competition, pricing, advertising, and product development drive demand among loyal and mobile customers. Use seasonality and the four fundaments - price, marketing, technology innovation, and human resources.

Boost product appeal through marketing choices and HR decisions, since a happy workforce improves quality. Invest strategically, considering time decay and each product’s sensitivity to price, promotion, R&D, and HR.

Make product and global decisions in an online portal, submit them, and read detailed reports—balance sheet, income statement, cash flow, inventory, and market share—to guide strategy.

Plan production management by managing manufacturing units and capacity growth, accounting for depreciation and acquisition costs, while renting extra capacity to encourage smoother production.

Explore HR management within production constraints, balancing 16,000 man hours, hourly costs, and overtime decisions for tablets, laptops, and interactive whiteboard.

Compute contribution margin from price minus variable costs, account for indirect costs and investments, and manage cash flow with loans to avoid overdrafts while monitoring equity, profit, trend, and dividends.

Session nine shows how to assess your company using weighted criteria: share price, networking capital, sales income, and cumulative profit—assign weights per strategy and compute scores from rankings times weights.

Pay for statistics, lost sales, competitive prices, and market share reports after month three to gauge demand and cash flow, or derive cash flow from income statement and balance sheet.

Plan a top-down strategy for the strategy simulation by conducting a team SWOT on the manual. Define goals, market position (volume cost or niche), and production and finance plans.

Navigate the simulation portal by logging in, accessing the control panel, completing the month 1 decision sheet for strategic goals, product, and global decisions, then send and download reports.

Apply strategic management in a realistic setting by developing a coherent plan integrating financial, marketing, and production decisions, market intelligence and competitive analysis, pricing, and product lifecycle.

Access the market tab to review graphs of historic inputs and results, and use the spreadsheet (file symbol tab) for a final analysis of your historic inputs and course evaluation.