Business Simulation
GENERAL MANAGEMENT

This course is the cornerstone of a comprehensive approach to managerial finance and strategic manage-ment. Participants will get important financial and strategic insights by means of the business simulation. Management teams will be competing against each other with the goal of maximizing shareholder value.

Subjects covered:

• Strategic Management
• Competitive strategies, Strategic positioning, Industry analysis, Organizational and financial require-ments of growth strategies
• Marketing
• Product life cycle management, Forecasting market growth and market volume, time to market, entering new markets, lifecycle costing and creating marketing mixes
• Operations management
• Optimizing manufacturing capacity and asset utilization, dealing with uncertainty in demand, capital budgeting, working capital management and “Make or buy?” considerations
• Corporate finance
• Budgeting, cost accounting, cash budgets, creating shareholder value, managing exchange rate risk, short-term profits vs long-term success and cost cutting when markets decline
• Human resource management

Objectives and learning Outcomes:

By the end of the seminar participants should be able to:

• Identify financial challenges executives have to deal with
• Establish long-term objectives, craft and implement a strategy
• Use financial ratios to analyze a firm's financial performance
• Convert financial ratios into decisions
• Prepare a company's financial pro-forma statements
• Develop strategic thinking and skills in strategic analysis
• Analyze the competitive environment and identify
  strategic opportunities and threats
• Balance conflicting objectives
• Make decisions in Teams
• See the big picture and set priorities

Course structure and teaching methods:

Since the course emphasizes “learning by doing” active participation is key. Participants work in teams competing against each other. Each team will have to go through several accounting periods (years) with increasing complexity as they advance and will have 2 – 3 hours to work through each scenario incorporating the outcomes of the previous period. Every team needs at least one notebook. Training specific software is utilised by the teams and is then used to evaluate and rank the performances.

Target market:

Current as well as future generations of managers with a basic background in business, employees without a business background needing to develop their business acumen, employees involved in controlling, costing, accounting and treasury.

Course Details:

• Duration is Four days (depending on the participants prior knowledge and identified training goals the duration could be adapted)
• Maximum 20 participants
• Training will be run at the facilities of the organisation in Question
• Dates can be arranged flexibly to suit the Client
• Training is conducted with two instructors