Thursday, 21 January 2016

Clean Sweep – A Competitive Financial Simulation


December 2015

Ososim’s latest simulation – Clean Sweep – is a highly dynamic and futuristic competitive simulation designed to build a strong understanding of the general principles behind financial statements and the drivers of value creation.

Simulating the market for domestic robots, participants run a business, which covers both manufacturing and service components. Four teams compete against each other and need to make decisions about supply and market positioning, as well as the strategic choices on where to focus investment and operational alternatives to implement those choices.  The goal for each company is to achieve the highest Economic Value Added for their business over the course of four years.

Participating in this engaging simulation, players will:
·       Gain insight into the impact of management decisions on the three main financial statements: the Cash Flow, the Income Statement, and the Balance Sheet;
·       Understand the differences, the linkages and the specific purposes of each of the financial statements in managing a competitive business; and
·       Experience the impact of competitive market dynamics on the short and long-term results of a business.

This is addition to learning around team decision making, data analysis, and dealing with complexity and ambiguity.

After each simulated year teams receive feedback on their business results and information about the market and their competition.   Teams have access to their company’s financial statements in the form of historical results and projected results, whilst able to model the impact of different decision combinations.

The backend of the simulation provides a large range of information to use between rounds and during the final debrief of the simulation.  This provides full transparency to all participants regarding the decisions, their impacts and outcomes. 

Top reasons for clients’ success in 2015

  1. Taking sales targets seriously and moving heaven and earth to achieve them
  2. 100% focus on the customer need and what customers get excited about
  3. Building a motivated team who enjoy doing what they do – the “mini-me entrepreneurs”
  4. Widening business planning and financial management understanding throughout the team
  5. Agile approach to strategy execution – establishing personal accountability for performance against desired milestones and timely course correction
  6. Clarifying vision and mission, embracing ambition and then going for it
  7. Continuously re-evaluating value proposition and differentiation to push innovation in real-time
  8. Being open to revenue generation from unexpected source
  9. Being flexible on shareholding dilution, i.e., being realistic on valuation, to get the right investors on board at the right time
  10. Being brave and thinking about succession planning early and loading on the responsibility