Analytical Report of Classmates Round 6 Decisions
Authorizer of Report: N.S. Miceli, Ph.D.
Preparer of Report: Allen Schurdell
Due Date: 10/5/09
Letter or Memo of Transmittal
The defined problem to be investigated is the practice
round 6 of the Capsim. This is being done to see if there are
any problems with my classmates practice rounds.
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Executive Summary
This analysis is to help a classmate out with the Capsim
practice rounds.
In this analysis I am going to break down the
results from their round six to look for places where the person
may have made some mistakes that may have cost his company
money.
I will also be discussing things that the classmate is
doing right that have his company moving in the right direction.
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Introduction
Throughout the process of the Capstone Courier each person
in the class has been running a company and making changes to
their company bases on previous performances.
Each person must
analyze each round that they complete and see where they may
have done something wrong and try to correct it.
In this
analysis I am going to go through my classmates reports for
round 6 and see if I can find anything that may need changed or
corrected.
I will be going through and looking at each section
of the report such as the R and D, Marketing, Production, and
Etc.
This will be done to try and help out my classmate and
give him my suggestions and where he may want to change things.
Purpose
The purpose of the analysis is to analyze the reports and
try and help my classmate with anything that he may be having a
problem with or may be having trouble understanding in the
Capstone Courier.
This report is going to be given to the
classmate so that they can read it and maybe learn something
that they didn’t know or couldn’t figure out about this program.
Hopefully and questions that they have about the program will be
answered in this report.
The main reason, as mentioned earlier,
is still to give the classmate a different perspective that may
be helpful to them to run a successful Capstone business.
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Scope
By applying what I have learned so far from the Capstone
Courier and from what decisions my classmate has already made on
earlier rounds, we can help each other correct any mistakes that
may have been made on earlier rounds.
This can be very helpful
because is someone isn’t understanding everything about the
Capstone company then someone else may be able to help us out
and get us going in the right direction.
Limitations, Delimitations, and Assumptions
In this report we are limited to their round six reports.
We don’t have any access to any of the earlier rounds so that we
can make comparisons.
Due to these limitations it makes it a
little harder to get a good understanding on what is really
going on and if they have been improving each round.
As for delimitations, these are things that we can’t
control.
Such as we can’t control what the other companies are
doing during the game.
We also assume that the goal for the Capsim game is to beat
the competitors and to be the best overall company.
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Methods and Procedures
For this report I will go through the different sections of
my classmates round six reports.
I will break down each section
and try to figure out what I think he should do to make his
company better.
I will compare his figures to his strategic
approach to make sure that they fall in line with what his
intentions are over the course of the game.
If I see anything
that may need to be changed or that is out of character I will
recommend that he make changes to it.
I will start of going
through the R and D section and making my way all the way
through to the Advanced Marketing and Labor Negotiations.
R & D
Looking at the reports from round 6 of the Capstone
Courier, it is obvious that my classmate understands what is
going on during this entire process of running this company.
When checking the basics of the R and D department he has
everything in place pretty much where it should be.
His
performance and size for each product is fairly close to the
recommended place.
His prices are also where they need to be
for the particular strategy that he is going with which is Cost
Leader with Product Lifecycle Focus.
In this category I don’t
see any significant problems with any of his products.
The only
thing that I can see is that the price for the High End product
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may be a little higher than it should be since he is a cost
leader.
Besides that one price being a little high I see
nothing else wrong with the R and D department.
He seems to
really understand his Strategy and is really sticking with it.
Marketing and Advanced Marketing
After reviewing his reports for the marketing section, I
again don’t see anything that is really out of place.
When
looking at his inventory everything seems to be fairly close
which means he is pretty close on his forecasting.
As for the
price, I have already mentioned what I thought about it in the R
and D section, but I feel that because the high end product
price is so high that it is affecting his profit.
His price is
higher than the ideal price which is causing his demand for that
product to drop. This is where the loss of profit comes in
because of the demand not being as high as it could be.
On the
second part of the marketing, I was looking at his Sales Budget
and Promotion Budget.
He seems to really understand this to
because his customer awareness is extremely high for all of his
products which is really good.
When looking at the Sales Budget
for the Traditional segment and the High End segment, he may
want to cut back just a little because his budget is fairly
higher than the rest of the competitors.
Still, I wouldn’t make
any major changes to this category either.
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As for advanced marketing, I feel that he has really got
his money put where it needs to be when it comes to marketing
whether it is by media, mail, tradeshows, and etc.
The
reasoning behind this can be determined by looking at the
customer awareness and December surveys.
He is way higher than
any of his competitors in both subcategories.
As for marketing
and advanced marketing I don’t have any major recommendations
other then maybe lowering the price of the high end product.
Other then that I, don’t see anything major that I would
recommend to change.
Production
The production part of this analysis is very good.
Although he dropped two of his products he is really making up
for it by selling an extreme amount of the three products he has
left.
His units sold for his low end product is nearly doubled
his competitors. In the other two categories, high end and
traditional, he is still higher than just about all of his
competitors.
This really makes up for the lost sales from the
two dropped products.
All the other subcategories in production
are fairly good also.
This includes his plant utilization, his
material cost, and the capacity.
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Finance
In the finance section, I notice that he had some current
debt that he has paid off this round and also he retired some
long time debt early.
Because of having negative cash position
he also had an emergency loan, but is wasn’t an extraordinary
amount.
Everything else in this section seems to be good.
I
don’t really have any recommendations because he paid off all of
his debts and there wasn’t anything really out of the ordinary.
Human Resource and Labor Negotiations
From the reports I can tell that has a pretty high turnover
rate when compared to his competitors.
nearly 3% higher than anyone else’s.
His turnover rate is
When compared to his
competitors, the amount of overtime his high.
have caused his turnover rate to be higher.
This is what may
The employees may
have not liked the amount of overtime they had to work.
I also
noticed that he the amount of trained hours was a lot higher
than the competitors so he may try and lower that down some.
His recruiting spending seems ok along with the productivity
index.
As for the labor negotiations, his starting negotiation
position was almost two dollars higher than the competitors.
This may sound like a bad thing but I really thing it worked out
good because it forced his competitors to strike for ten days.
So I would recommend that he keep his negotiations higher to try
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and make his competitors strike.
If they are striking that
means they aren’t producing which means that you can maybe take
their customer’s which is a good thing.
TQM
The TQM section is in really good condition.
He has put a
lot of money into his TQM which is really going to help reduce
some of the cost and even increase the demand for the products.
I feel that by having his total expenditures so much higher than
his competitors it is really going to force them to raise their
totals to try and keep up.
For the TQM section I really don’t
have any recommendations.
Report of Summary
Throughout this analytical report I broke down each section
to see what needed changed to help better my classmate’s capsim
company.
By breaking down each category I looked at all the
facts for each of the sections.
I also had to take into
consideration which segment he was going with.
Each section had
a lot of different things to look at to determine what might
need changed.
and Etc.
I looked at the R and D, Marketing, Production,
After looking at all of those I would come up with
some suggestions that may be helpful in making his company
better.
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Conclusion
In conclusion I feel that my classmate really understands
the Capsim simulation.
six rounds of the game.
He has done pretty well so far through
After looking at his reports, there
weren’t many suggestions that I would give him.
seems to be going in the right direction.
Everything
Some of the things
that I would suggest include lowering the price of the High End
Product, and to stick with the high labor negotiations to make
his competitors strike.
Besides these couple of recommendations
I feel that he should really just keep doing what he is doing
because everything seems to be going really well.
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Analytical Report of Classmates Round 6
Decisions
By: Allen Schurdell
Strategic Management
N.S. Miceli, Ph.D.
10/05/09
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