Reflection Case
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This paper will reflect on my perceptive of capstone strategic management simulation and I feel that Capsim is the most beneficial module because it taught me the most about real world experiences and issues and it has really prepared me very well to be a leader and also as entrepreneur Im confident that I can run my own company at any given time. When I started with the Rehearsal simulation I really thought that this would be a much easier exercise as I was following the instruction but it was not as easy as I thought. It is unbelievable how much I have learned from the Capsim business simulation. Throughout this reflection, I will be discussing the variety of strategies that we implemented throughout the simulation and the reasoning behind them. Throughout this reflection, I plan to discuss Organization of my team, strategy and Tactics, Our Team Performance and the reasoning behind this.
My team- Andrews did not perfomance well in the rehearsal rounds. This was mainly because we didnt pay much attention at the courier reports and our competitors. This was a wakeup call for us and we decided to have closely looked at the courier reports and we combined our learning before the actual rounds started.
Organization of my team ( Team Andrews)
My team solidly decided that everyone will take part on all the decisions and we agreed that we will not divide the responsibilities among ourselves on the basis of functional areas. When we started the our official round 1, we all worked on our own then later we will meet and discuss each member decision and the reasoning behind that decision then we will agree on the right decision then Salim we will submit the final decision on behalf of the team. By interacting with my team I learned a lot in terms of blind spot and courier I did not analyse competitors decisions and strategize before making my decision to hedge against the moves of other companies. We had few challenges in the beginning in terms of communicating and submitting our decision but we addressed this issue and we had our group work programme which had due date for submission and meeting. Salim play a vital role in our team, he really step forward as a leader. Some of our member did not participate that much but we decided to call a meeting and we did not have much issues afterwards. Our team members was really great, I was battling with sales forecasting and I didnt know how to accurately predict demand in the next year and produce adequately in most cases I had ended up with excessive inventory and we discuss and I learned how to do an accurate forecasting. . I was so amazed by the idea that the market does not compensate Research & Development R&D. I think one person can run the company simulation alone because I was paying more attention into the balance score card when I compare my own final results from the balance score card it was way better than our team final score.
Strategy and Tactics
When we had our team meeting we wanted to have a strategy that will make our company to achieve growth and be sustainable profitable with a great shareholder return. And some of the team members also thought the strategy is not that crucial to the business in its initial stages but during our official first round we thought of different strategies, we then decided that we would follow a cost leadership strategy which focuses on “a lower-cost competitive strategy that aims at the broad mass market and requires efficient scale facilities, cost reductions, and cost and overhead control. Our strategy avoids marginal customers, and aims for cost minimization in R&D, service, sales force, and advertising.”
We avoided introducing any new products because we were trying by all means to prevent paying large start-up costs without having enough funds only introduced a new product in Round 7 (Active)
We remained relatively sparing with our allocated expenses to marketing (promotion and sales budgets) to keep our costs low and contribution margins high. In our first round Able price R29.50, Acre R19.50, Adam R39.00, Aft R34.50 and Agape R34.50.
We decided to increase and decrease our Mean Time before Failure (MTBF) in some of our products because we wanted to make sure that all our projects are completed before the 31st of December under the rule that the new projects can only begin on the 1st of January as we cannot begin the follow up project next year. e.g. If the Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of (The Traditional and Low End segments) in which MTBF as a buying criteria was not very important to the customer to the minimum specification within the acceptable range to the customer (i.e. If the desired range for MTBF was 17,500 – 23,000 for a product that did not base much of their purchasing decision on MTBF, we would set the MTBF for that product at the minimum of 17,500). The reasoning behind this was to make sure we keep costs at minimum by decreasing the reliability (which saves money in production costs) of those products in which customers did not care about the MTBF.
We also increase automation for the products that did not have instantly changing market buying criteria specifications ( i.e. If the expectations regarding performance and side stayed the same from round 1 to round 8 because their drift rates were small, then we would increased automation for that particular line within the first year.
My team (Andrews) competitive strategy involved maintaining great price in every segment and ensuring that our products met our customers needs by focusing on their top two most important product attributes. This strategy played a vital role as we were leading in all rounds