Product Description:
Key Benefits:
What is the simulation for?
Learners make a range of business decisions within a dynamic changing market with a focus on financial management and performance. By enabling decision-making the simulation focuses on transferable skills-building rather than information recollection.
The game features a very detailed profit and loss, cashflow and balance sheet model. Management accounts are generated each month and then annual accounts are 'filed' at the end of each completed year. Key financial ratios and performance indicators illustrate relative performance measures. This exposes learners to financial terminology and concepts in a realistic and meaningful way.
All decisions cause realistic, logical business outcomes, e.g. falls in market share when prices are increased sharply allowing learners to understand the interdependencies of various business concepts.
The game forces students to think about the connections between marketing, finance and production, and the role of uncertainty in business
The simulation is engaging and fun to use in small teams, individually, or as a group activity on an interactive whiteboard or data projector
Being an online product, the game is constantly kept up-to-date and will never date.
Gameplay - What Does The User Actually Do?
Review historical business performance and future forecasts from the context of their job role.
Decide which distribution channel to use. As this could be difficult first-time through, hints are provided as to the best bet, given the product selected.
Make decisions about where to position the product in the marketplace. Should the strategy be high-feature/high product quality but high price, or cheap and cheerful? All competitor information is provided, plus the unit costs of production.
Production decisions are needed based on an initial sales forecast provided by the computer. The user can decide to upgrade production capacity or increase output gradually by, for example, paying staff overtime.
All the time, the learner is being encouraged to remember that they have targets to achieve and thus focuses their mindset on performance.
What will the learner achieve?
At a simple level, learners will be exposed to key finance terms and concepts (e.g. 'P&L', 'management accounts' and 'cashflow'). They will also be exposed to a selection of financial KPIs such as 'ROCE' and understand the purpose and benefits of tracking such measures.
As they practice and strive to achieve the in-game targets that they have been set, they will quickly begin to grasp the sensitivities of each factor (e.g. the importance of working capital) and be able to understand the interdependence of the different aspects of the business from a financial standpoint.
Will I Struggle To Master It?
All of our products have been designed to create effective learning solutions. Whilst we aim to create genuinely engaging and satisfying learner experiences we recognize that our audience are invariably not 'hard core gamers' and as such the interfaces and game structures are designed with this in mind. Our design methodologies focus on creating strong opportunities for measurable learner performance and reduced time to competency.
Categories:
Primary Purpose:
Simulation
Target Sector:
Business Enterprise Modelling