Week 1 – Assignment: Complete Simulation Practice Rounds and Assess Company Performance

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Instructions

Week 1 is focused on helping you to become comfortable using the CAPSIM simulation and using the results from one round to prepare decisions for the next round.

The training will teach you how the various business functions interact in the simulation, how to make decisions and then read the results. You will be making decisions that position your product against customer requirements, building a production process that allows you to meet the market demands for your products, how to finance those operations and how to improve processes and products through Research and Development and Total Quality Management. Finally, you will learn to read and interpret a full set of performance documents including Cash Flow Statements, Income Statements, Production and Sales summaries and the Balanced Scorecard.

As part of the training, you will complete the following:

• Introduction Video and Quiz
• Rehearsal Tutorial
• Situation Analysis
  • See pages 1-2 of the document, “CAPSIM Situational Analysis Training,” for a visual on how to find the tutorials and situational analysis.
• See pages 3-6 of the document, “CAPSIM Situational Analysis. Training” for the following:
  • Complete a minimum of TWO Practice Rounds.
• Complete Financial Measures Template (see below. The template is loaded in your Books and Resources for this Week).

The instructor will check the simulation dashboard to confirm that you have completed these exercises. It is important that you spend the time during Week 1 doing these exercises to become comfortable with how the simulation works and what effects some of your decisions will have on the annual financials, etc. The simulation has a steep learning curve, so Week 1 is meant for you to become familiar with the simulation.

Please note that your grade in the course does not depend on how well you do in the simulation. In that sense, the “competition rounds” are a misnomer. You can do well or poorly in the rounds. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you can understand and explain the effects that your decisions had on the financial results, which you will track weekly with the Financial Measures Template.

Complete the Financial Measures Template:

• Financial Analysis is a comparative process. These numbers on their own do not always have a lot of meaning. For example, Cumulative Profits has meaning on its own, but it has greater meaning when compared against the competition or when looking at your own trends over time. Your analysis in Week 1 of the Practice Rounds or Competition Rounds will have to be made against the other five companies. After that, consider your trends over time as well as against the other companies.
• Select a different measure each week and write a paragraph describing how that financial measure is created (e.g., ROS=Profit/Sales) and cite your source, what the financial measure tells the company, and how your performance compares with the competition and over time.
• Upload your Financial Measures Template to the course room when you have completed all of the tasks using the Upload Assignment button below. Each week, you will update your Template with new results from each round.

Length: 1-2 Paragraphs: See directions in Financial Measures Template

Upload the Financial Measures Template and click the Submit to Dropbox button.