MBA: Module 8, Capstone Simulation

The final module of the team portion of the program was a week-long simulation. With 13 teams, we were split up into two separate fictional industries of firms competing with what were called set-top boxes...kind of like Tivo systems. The simulation itself is done by an organization called Links Simulations...I guess they're pretty popular with the business schools. Some of my friends that went to other schools did the same sort of exercise. You can get a sense of the simulation here.

The simulation ran for 10 financial quarters. We had to submit a memo for each quarter discussing our decisions. We also had to submit a final 5-page report explaining how we made our decisions, why we made them, and whether or not someone should invest in our company. These write-ups were a bit of a pain. Especially the final report!

The simulation itself was a great exercise though, run by Professor Peter Dacin, the husband of Tina Dacin who taught the Strategic Implementation and Change course I talked about in an earlier post. My team ended up winning our industry with the highest cumulative net income. It was a really good way to end for our team. We had some rough patches along the way, but we really came together at the end. We had to make service, marketing, pricing, and production decisions every quarter while keeping an eye on our competition and what they were doing. There were three primary markets: US, Europe, and the Pacific region. A new Latin American market was introduced half way through the simulation. We also had two selling channels: retail and direct. We had to observe market trends, customer trends, competition product configurations, and pricing. We also had to watch our production costs and decide whether or not to invest in plant capacity. It's hard to explain exactly what we did and how we did it without going into lots of detail. I took on the production decisions and worked with two other people on forecasting decisions. Our overall long-term strategic decisions were made together as a team with different people checking research reports, industry trends, and competitive position. Here's a little bit of what my spreadsheet reporting looked like...there's a comparison of forecasted sales versus actual sales and the overall trends:



Our prize for winning is that we'll have our names engraved on a plaque that future classes can ooh and aah over. It was a weird feeling when it was all over. One of our team mates is going on exchange to China and we may not see him again. We'll all be taking different classes in the elective portion of the program so we may not even interact all that much for classes. It was a strange feeling at the end of it. It didn't last long though...we went out on our '12 bars of christmas' tour that night and burned a few brain cells.