Basics of What You’ll Be Doing (& tutorials/help files)
Posted by hunttim1 on June 8, 2007
This is a brief explanation of what you’ll be doing at SSI:
Each team, or company, of 4 students will be in charge of managing a fictional manufacturing company over the course of 8 years. You will use simulation software (using an excel spreadsheet) called “Foundation” on a computer to do this. You don’t need to know how to use this software ahead of time – it is very simple, and I will show all of you how to use it once you arrive at camp, and coaches are always available to help you throughout the week as well.
When using the software, you will be able to make decisions about what characteristics you want your products to have (within the specified industry of “electronic sensors”), how much of your product to produce, whether to expand your manufacturing plants or automate them, how much to spend on advertising, and how to finance the entire operation. Each “year” you will be able to make or change all of those decisions. You will make those decisions within the software, and once all 6 companies have made their decisions, you will submit them to me, and the software will analyze what each of you did in relation to the others, and decide how much of each product each company sold, and calculate your stock prices, remaining inventory, and remaining cash based on everyone’s decisions.
Once that has happened, you’ll each get a report called “Foundation FastTrack” showing what occurred that year, and you can use that report to analyze what your competitors did, what strategies they might be using to build their companies, and what you should do for the next year. You’ll repeat that process 8 times: making decisions for your company and submitting them, then getting a report back so you can analyze what happened and what you need to do next to make your company succeed at its goals. A successful company is not necessarily the one that sells the most – that is only part of the equation. You will receive a score based on “cumulative profits”, “stock price”, “return on equity (RoE)”, and “market capitalization”. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain what each of those are at camp, and how you affect each one for your company.)
That’s the basics. We’ll go over it much more in-depth on the first day of camp, of course, and there are other details you’ll learn along the way. NOTE: You can ignore anything related to the Human Resources or TQM aspects of the simulation software. Those are parts of the software that we will shut off for our purposes.
Here are some files to get you started:
Intro Lessons
Each of these is the same lesson, just in a different format.
Video Version with audio
Video Version without audio
Non-Video Version (webpage) part 1
Non-Video Version (webpage) part 2
If you read the non-video version, make sure to go through both parts 1 and 2.
Guides
Student Guide
You will have a printed copy of this booklet given to you at camp. This is the first thing you will be instructed to read, so you can get a head start by reading through it now. If you don’t understand it, don’t worry we’ll be going through everything in it at camp, and you can always ask questions on this blog as well.
Manager Guide
This guide is only available online, not in written format, but you will have an internet connection at camp during your study times so you can refer to this as well. There is a LOT more information here than you will need, so don’t be intimidated. Again, ask questions if you want to, that’s what this site is here for.
mandycat said
Wow! I am a little confused right now. It’s hard to separate all that human resourses stuff from the rest. However, I think I understand at least the R&D stuff pretty well. Thanks for making this available ahead of time. If you hadn’t, we all would have had to cram when we got to SSI!
hunttim1 said
The site is just to get info out ahead of time, to make it a little easier on people, so when you hear the information for a second time during instruction times, it will hopefully be easier to understand at that point, having read through it once before.
Don’t worry about being confused, you’ll get the hang of everything within the first couple days of camp.
Since these files are provided on the website of the company that gives us the simulation software, we can’t modify the information to remove the HR and TQM information that you don’t need. Just so you’re all aware, this software is typically used for college business courses, both undergrad and graduate level. They would normally have an entire semester to go through the material; since we have a week, we opted to not use the HR and TQM parts, and have shut those off in our simulation, because we’d need to extend camp to 2 or 3 weeks to be able to have enough time to go through that stuff. If you really want to find out about it though, ask professor Britten at camp, he can explain it to you.
garywbritten said
Welcome, SSI Business Track Participants!
Tim’s advice is “spot on.” My MBA students find it much easier going when they do the demonstrations and tutorials. I’d recommend at least going through the “How To” demonstrations for Sales Forecast and Cash Flow. Please don’t be shy about getting back to us with any questions you have! See you all next week!