The game is an Excel spreadsheet, once open you need to click on add-ins at the top of the screen in order

for the game to be available.

Capsim Tutoring System will teach you how to fine tune your game. You will learn how to set up your Marketing, Sales, Promotions, and how to balance your marketing efforts. You will learn how to set up your Total Quality Management (TQM), you can spend 20 million per round in TQM to assist you in reducing your costs, and obviously this can get very expensive and could destroy profits if you do it incorrectly. The Capsim Tutoring System explains every detail that you need to understand in order to dominate your industry and leave your entire class wondering how you got this game so figured out. The Capsim Tutoring System will teach you to run your company profitably, and how to increase the value of your company in a way that will cause your stock price to skyrocket.

Open R&D

This is your starting point.

This is where you will enter the ideal spots that you received from your professor. You will have a performance number and a size number. The higher the performance numbers the better. The smaller the size number the smaller the chip will be. With each product segment you will need to decide what the MTBF will be. The MTBF is the Mean Time before Failure or the quality of the product. Each segment will have a range of what the acceptable MTBF will need to be. The higher the MTBF the better consumers will like the product. High

MTBF has a trade off for your business, the higher the MTBF the longer it takes you to get your product out of R&D. This will cost you additional money and Time wasted not making sales. Sooner is better but it is not everything. A great product will out sell a cheaply made product. TIP: Some products perform really well when you use the ideal spots, while other segments perform better when tweaked just a little. Tweaking should be done with caution. I tweaked the products that I was creating at the time of creation. Instead of putting the products in 1 round ahead I would put them in a round and a half ahead, but only if the segment is driven by placement, Like High. Now you must make certain that each segment will release within the same year. If you do not do this you will miss out on an enormous amount of sales. The High end segment will not allow you to release on its ideal spot during the first 3 rounds, so I will give you the figures that will allow the high performance segment to soar. Look for the specific data in the Capsim Tutoring Round By Round Data. Traditional: put it on its Ideal spot Low End: Do Not Move This until Round 3. The Only Thing You Enter Is the MTBF. Size, High, and Performance Can Be played On Their Ideal Spots; however, when Introducing New Products You Can Set The Ideal Spots Ahead By More Than One Full Round To Make A Product Better.

Now you will need to go to Marketing

Here you will need to enter the prices for each segment, and your production forecasts. The Capsim Tutoring Round By Round Data will show you the exact pricing and strategy used to make tremendous sales, Just a hint the actual business plan and marketing approach is not listed as an option in the book nor will your professor explain how to do what you will learn here. This information has come from running countless rounds against the Capsim servers. Let all of the sheep continue to run their business by the book and they will continue to get by the book results. I will show you how to get extraordinary results. You will use a broadly diversified strategy over all but after round one you will convert to a Low cost leader strategy on Traditional and Low End. This is the only strategy that makes sense as you will want to follow the strengths of each segment not try to force the segment to comply with your strategy.

Setting prices for each segment is critical to success; Cumulative Profits and Contribution Margin are tied directly to your pricing strategy and to the success of your game. Set Size, High, and Performance price to the maximum amount allowable. Traditional and Low are more price sensitive and require a pricing strategy. You will be playing with a split differentiated strategy. You will differentiate the Niche markets, Performance, High, and Size, while taking on a low cost leadership strategy with Traditional and Low End. This is the ONLY SENSIBLE STRATEGY found. You must play to the strengths of each market segments purchasing requirements. When forecasting the game the Capsim Tutoring system is the best around and has literally been tested against the Capsim Servers countless times and it works fantastic. The Capsim Tutoring Spread sheet will allow you to easily forecast your sales and production and help you determine exactly how much capacity you will need from round to round to keep your production facility running efficiently. You could simply memorize the data in the Capsim Tutoring Data for all of your pricing and forecasting but if you really want to excel in this game you really need the Spreadsheet and you will be extremely glad you have it and have learned to use it if your memory fails you while youre testing. You will get the sales forecast figures from the spreadsheet to put into the Marketing page.

Adding a new product to a segment is a tricky proposition , get it right and your profits and market capitalization will grow exponentially, get it wrong and this is the biggest reason that students and teams get emergency loans that destroy their company. To receive maximum points and Profits you need to have 8 products. Having 8 products complicates things if you do not have a great spreadsheet that has been optimized for this specific game. With 8 products you must get 8 forecasts correct. With the Capsim Tutoring System this is not an issue; the Capsim Tutoring System is designed to give you 8 accurate forecasts. These are the actual prices that I used to start round 1, remember the prices. The Spreadsheet will give you the forecast. Its important that you set the prices this way, and yes the traditional and low end, are deliberately set high so we can afford to launch the new product. Now with the new Traditional product you cannot set the price yet but you will want to forecast for it on the spreadsheet so you will know how much capacity to set up in production. Your sales forecast here is not the same as what your actual production will be, this page simply gives the Performa Income Statement information about how well you are running the company. These figures are deliberately low so you can exceed them and gain your forecasting and production points. Once you get the hang of how the forecasting and the spreadsheet work you will want to forecast even closer to what the actual sales will be. Which is your production number given in the spreadsheet and the inventory on hand minus any additional units that you may have tacked on for stock out insurance.

Production
You want to have just enough capacity to make your full production while maximizing your first and second shift without having any overtime. Your goal is to run your production facility at 200%. Not only is this the most efficient way to run your company but it also insures you against mistakes of a stock out. You need to be careful when selling capacity because you will only get 3/4 value for it, and when you repurchase it you will pay full price. When you have added automation buying capacity back will get real expensive. I will show you exactly how much to sell in round 1 and how much to buy for the new Traditional product. This is very important as you will need the cash to fund your expansion and automation. This is incredibly important information because if you get it right your production facility will be ultra efficient and if you get it wrong you are wasting huge amounts of capital and you risk bankruptcy loans from Big "AL" Which will kill your game. The Capsim Tutoring System will give you the exact figures needed for capacity for each round. You will know what and how much to sell and when to sell it as well as how much you will need to buy. Look at the Capsim Tutoring Round By Round Data page. Automation is critical to reducing costs of labor on each segment. Automation needs to be done in the beginning rounds of the game to have the biggest impact on your profits. You will continue to improve your plant in latter rounds but the majority of automation needs to be done by round 2. Look at the automation purchased for each round in the Capsim Tutoring Round By Round Data . The number in the production schedule row can not exceed double the amount of your first shift capacity. Keeping these 2 figures matched exactly doubled will keep your production facility running at 200% which is the most efficient mode. 200% is also stock out insurance because the game thinks that you can not produce any more than what you did so if you stock out its not counted against you. These are the actual figures that I used to set up my round 1, When Using your spreadsheet you will notice that I have rounded the production figures up because I find it easier to deal with rounded numbers. Round 1 you will not get a great score because you are setting up your company for future rounds so dont worry about the score in this round.

Take special notice of the amounts of capacity that I sold and how much I purchased. Now look at the automation this is SUPER CRITICAL, you must get the automation done in the beginning rounds so you can have the greatest advantage in cost reductions. In the lower right hand side of the Production page you will see a figure titled Max Invest. This is how much you can invest this round based on the expectations of the game. The number above it is how much you have invested so far. If you exceed this number you will need to finance more that what the game expected, this is still doable and will happen in rounds 2&3. After that the company will be making great profits and your stock prices will be skyrocketing above the pack. Any doubts just look at the round 8 stock price in the Capsim Tutoring Data.

Make certain that the labor Compliment on the production page is accurate and changed each round as needed. The part that says This Year must match the part that says needed. Simply click into the This Year box and type in the correct figure. This is figure will change a lot after you have added automation and paid for TQM. Before submitting each round go back to this page and make sure they match because if you have made changes in TQM, automation or production levels this compliment will change. For all the other rounds Continue to enter the data provided and from the Spreadsheet. Look at the Capsim Tutoring Round By Round Data pages for the specific round information needed. The number one thing to remember with the Strategic Management game is the game is scored on how many points you get each round. 1000 Points are available each round 100 points for each of the 10 categories. The Categories are Margins, Profits, Emergency Loans, Working Capital, Market Share, Forecasting, Customer Satisfaction, Productivity, Financial Structure, and Wealth Creation.

Financing In round 1 you will need to use every source of financing available. Long term debt, current debt, and stock issues. Max everything out you will need it all. After round 1 you must remember that current debt is EVIL and must never be used again. Current debt must be repaid in its entirety the following round. Rounds 2-8 be very careful of how much stock that you issue, the more stock issued the lower your stock price will be which in turn lowers your ROE. Long term debt is the best form of financing in this game because you will only repay 2-3 of the bond issues and the bond interest. In the latter round you will not need as much financing because your company will be making lots of cash. Issuing bonds in the latter rounds is like free money because you will not have to pay it back. You must balance your leverage and your days of working capital. Check the Capsim Tutoring Round by Round data pages to see the exact figures that you should use to keep these balanced.

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