MAREKTPLACE SIMULATIONS REPORT OF BUSINESS SIMULATION FOR SERIOUS EDUCATORS

Investment/ Capital spending on sales expansion and manufacturing productivity:

In this part, our team will evaluate four areas relative to competition. These include:

· Regional Expansion of sales offices and web sales.

· Productivity and sales channel effectiveness.

· Connect investments in manufacturing to worker productivity, stocks out and brand reliability.

· Investments in brand development.

Regional expansion of sales offices and web sales:

We will evaluate this area based on market potential of regions. Technology At Your Finger Tips has opened its sales office in LOS ANGELES, CHICAGO and MEXICO CITY in the NORAM region. Considering the segments targeted by ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ (i.e., Innovator, Mercedes & Workhorse), TORONTO must not be ignored as it has higher potential and demand compared to Mexico City for all three segments. This company also completely ignored MEA region as they haven’t opened a single sales office in this region. Opening an office in ABU DHABI would be quite beneficial for this company. Moving to LATAM region, this company opened its offices in SAO PAULO and SANTO DOMINGO. It was also inappropriate decision to prefer SANTO DOMINGO over SANTIAGO as it has higher potential demand in all three segments targeted by ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’. In EUROPE region, again the executive team miscalculated the demand and choose PARIS over LONDON which was a wrong decision. We can clearly see that London had higher market potential than PARIS in all three target segments (i.e., Innovator, Mercedes & Workhorse) selected by ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’. In APAC region TOKYO was a lucrative market to operate but this company didn’t open any office here.

Talking about web sales center, ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ invested only in NORAM and EUROPE region and opened their webs sales centers.

To comprehend, the overall investment in regional expansion through sales offices and web centers was not up to the mark. ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ missed many opportunities and invested in many cities where the demand was low.

Productivity and sales channel effectiveness:

Here we can see the channel profitability of ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’. Sales offices of this company are clearly more profitable than web sales center. The expenses of web sales centers are quite high while the net margin or channel profit of web sales center is quite low. It indicates two things. The first thing is that right decisions were not made in web marketing expenses which has increased the overall expense and reduced profits of these channels. Secondly, sales offices were more profitable in all three regions compared to web offices (Marketplace Simulations., 2018a).

Connect investments in manufacturing to worker productivity, stocks out and brand reliability:

Brand reliability is increased by investing wisely and timely in improving product quality. We can check the improvements through the following graphs. The blue lines indicate the current condition of these parts while the red line indicates the improvement after investing. Narrower graph represents higher quality. Through these graphs we can see that although ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ was investing in the quality improvements but these investments were quite low. If the graph was between -3 and +3, it indicates the quality is under control. However, none of these graphs lie between -3 and +3 which indicates there’s a lot of room for improvement. Industry worker productivity was good for this company. The highest worker productivity was 85% for Microtech. ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ was slightly below it with 83.4% worker productivity in NORMA region. However, the productivity lacked in LATAM region as the highest worker productivity was 91.8 % for Microtech while ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ was only having 73.7 % worker productivity (Marketpkace Simulations., 2019b).

Investments in brand development:

To improve their brand, ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ invested in Research and development by investing in cloud storage and operating systems. This company owns multiple brands whose brand judgement score was below 70 which is not acceptable in market. It means a lot of improvements were needed to build a strong brand. For instance, In Mercedes, which is the primary segment of this company, the highest brand judgement score is 45 which is quite below the acceptable level. Similarly, all other brands of ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ in Mercedes segment was lower than 45. Even one brand in the Mercedes segment “WorkEase” has the lowest brand judgment score of 10.

Talking about the Innovator segment, of the brand has brand judgement score of 70+. ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ brand Merclnno had the brand judgement score of 75. It indicates good score as the highest score in this segment was 83. However, there were some brands of this company in innovator segment as well that performed poorly. For instance, a brand named as WorkEase in Innovator segment has the brand judgement score of 29.

In Workhorse segment, none of the brands from ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ achieved the brand judgement’s benchmark of 70. The highest score in this segment for ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ was 68. Moreover, the lowest score of a ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ brand in Workhorse segment was 19 for TravelMax. These results shows that customer didn’t perceive the products of ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ in a good way which also indicates in the sales and demand. If the executive team at ‘Technology at Your Finger Tips’ was able to closely observe the competitors brand and created a strategy accordingly, the results would be different. Rather than stuffing the products with unnecessary accessories and items, if they were able to include things in the products according to customers, the results would be totally different. Finally, investment wisely in research and development segment would also have changed the overall scenario.

References

Marketpkace Simulations. (2019b). Retrieved from https://game.ilsworld.com/mpl/web7/engine.php?tpl=student&quarter=8&language=en-us&resource=brandjudgment&parentResource=brand-management&tab=workspace

Marketplace Simulations. (2018a). Retrieved from International Corporate Management with Real Economic Conditions: https://game.ilsworld.com/mpl/web7/engine.php?tpl=student&quarter=8&language=en-us&resource=sales-channel&tab=task

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