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Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

Business Simulation
Project Retrospection Report
Team Andrews

Group Members:

17PT-006 Deepak Sharma

17PT-008 Lakshmi Srinivasan

17PT-013 Sachin Raswant

17PT-019 Tanmay Shah

Signify Classified - Internal

Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

Our Journey
This business simulation course has given us the near-real experience of the actual business
world. It not only helped us recollect learnings from various subjects taught in our
management course; but also brought the aligned teams work together like the real
enterprises.

Many of us were personified and were experiencing alike CEO, CHRO, CMO, Production Heads
and the aligned business head roles.

The given playground gave us a risk-free environment to apply classroom knowledge to real
life situation where we were taking the decisions as a team. It also engaged the entire class
strategize across product definition, cost leadership, quality control, sales, marketing, finance
and evaluate the other group constructively as competitors.

The primary focus of our team was to adhere to the guidelines mentioned in the capstone
courier specially when placing the products on the perpetual map was concerned.

Our team strategy was mainly focused on traditional, low-end and high-end market segment
which has the 75% share of the overall market. By 8th round, our team become the market
leader with 21% market share in traditional and low-end market space.

The Capstone courier report has been of great source of help while evaluating performance
and strategizing the next move; by analyzing the performance report of competitors.

With this retrospection report, the intent is to share across the learnings we as group have
got in the very near business playground.
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Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

The Good Decisions

Product Differentiation Strategy
We were always spot on in terms of placing the particular segment of product and always
being aware of its position on perpetual map as per industry requirement specially in
traditional and low-end segment where we were always the market leaders.

The Capstone courier has helped us analyze, how the competitors were placing their product
and with how much variation.

In the High-End and Performance product, Ferris was placing the product configuration
slightly above and gaining the good market share. We also adopted the similar strategy for
the new product, launched in this segment and brought a good share with Afta, which got
stocked-out in the last round.

Sales & Marketing

Timely investments in sales and promotion budgets to gain awareness and accessibility,
especially in Low and Traditional segment. This helped us in increasing awareness of our
products among customers and increased the accessibility of the high-volume products.

Did good R & D and placed the products on the offset point of perpetual map and as per the
customer requirement. This helped us in gaining good market share, mainly in Low and
Traditional Segment.

With this our core-products reached two-third of the customer reachability.

Quality Management and Controlling

TQM was planned effectively at the correct time, which gave us advantage in terms of lower
cost of material and labour in few rounds and increased demand for our products which
clearly reflected on our sales. Had it not been the TQM investments at the right time our
variable costs would have been much higher.

The timely investment has brought the best results among all our competitors, in the last
round (Round # 8).

 Material Cost Reduction: 11.56%

 Labour Cost Reduction: 13.88%
 R & D cycle time: 40.01%
 Administration Cost: 60.02%
 Demand Increase: 14.29%
Signify Classified - Internal

Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

The Bad Decisions

Product Automation Levels
The importance of automations was realized quite late; as to how important it can be in terms
of reducing labour costs specially in the product segments which have high volume demand
in the market , as a result of this our variable costs were quite high and despite being the
market leader overall in the end in terms of sales and market share collectively for 8 rounds
we were not able to leverage the advantage of a sound strategic decisions in terms of pitching
our products in a particular segment.

Irrespective of better revenue then our competitors; our contribution margins and
performance ratios were impacted; due to very-high labor cost. While the material cost was
almost similar; but our labor cost got the various of 200%, as compared with our competitors.

Financing Structures, considering product development risks

We did not used the wealth creating opportunity like taking a long term/short term loan early
and investing in proper initiatives. Taking advantage of this could have made huge difference
in our cumulative profits and the balanced scorecard.

In Round 4 & 7, we had a $2,492,212 & $679,332 emergency loans respectively; due to large
carrying costs for High, Performance & Size segments.

To avoid early risk, instead of taking long term debt in the beginning, we took short loans,
which stopped us in making conservative moves in later rounds to maintain lead. Also did
not invest in automation in early years. Due to that our profits and contribution margin were
very low, as compared to other competitors

Capacity Planning
In Round 3, we invested good amount of money and invented a High-End product through
good R&D, but did not purchase capacity/automation in Production, so the product didn't hit
the market until Round 7.

Also we end-up spending more on Material and labour costs, due to that our contribution
margin was always low.
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Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

Key Learnings
Business Framework; the 360-degree of enterprise ecosystem

The biggest learnings we got; is the 360-degree view of how an enterprise work and how
closely the aligned business function work together to meet the aligned business objectives
of the organization.

The aligned simulation round was framed to cover the real-life challenges around Economics,
Business environment, Marketing, Human Resource, Quality and other important functions
and this has helped us the larger business cycle over many years.

Overall, this tool provided us with a rich as well as complexities to deal with strategies as well
as advanced business finance with cross functional alignment, competitive analysis and the
selection of tactics to build a successful and focused organization.

Apply the corrective measures to the bad decisions

 Strategize pro-actively across all aligned business functions.

 Invest in automation at the early stage, which will help us to reduce labor cost
 For long-term investment like R & D, TQM go for debt vs short-term loan
 Purchase the required capacity, for the new products and market demands
 Promotion and Sales budget according to life-cycle of the product

Always, closely listen to professor guidelines…

During the initial time-period of this course, we haven’t put much focus on reading all study
materials, which would have given us the edge to understand the business model and
definitely would have addressed the challenges around timely action over projection,
operational efficiency, capacity planning, financial planning.

In the real business world, the key expertise is always aligned with one individual which bring
the complete focus on one business-function and bring us out from the risk of missing any
aspect of that function. We missed to have continuous focus on this, while keeping most of
focus on product configurations.

The future state of products, how and when the products are to be transitioned from one
segment to the other. This definitely would have saved a lot of cost towards research,
material and labor.
Signify Classified - Internal

Project Assignment PGDM - Part Time (17-20)

Some analysis, which we did…

MARKET GROWTH ANALYSIS

VARIABLE COST ANALYSIS

SEGMENT ANALYSIS