The F & B Enterprises Management Flight Simulator gives you the opportunity to 'pilot' a company from start up to success. Each simulated time period you will make strategic and operational decisions, and receive feedback from your past decisions. You will decide how fast to grow, how to set prices, and how aggressively to market. Your policies will shape the growth of demand and the way your competitors fight back. You may be surprised by side effects and delayed con sequences of your own decisions. You may face financial crises or unexpected opportunities. You may go bankrupt, or grow to dominate the industry. But there is no winning or losing. The purpose of the game is to to give you insight into the issues raised by the particular case; to illustrate the difficulties of coordinating operations and strategy in a growth market; and to understand the dynamic interconnections among a firm, its market, and its competitors.
F & B Enterprises provides an experiential introduction to issues incorporate strategy, marketing, competitive analysis, and decision making. The game focuses on the management of a packaged goods product through its complete life cycle, from launch through maturity. Players take the role of top management of F & B Enterprises, a fictitious food and beverage manufacturer. The game begins as a new product is launched, and players are responsible for making marketing, pricing, and capacity expansion decisions to maximize their cumulative profit over the next 40 quarters. The potential market is large, but as in real life key attributes of the market, including its size and price elasticity, consumer repurchase behavior and responsiveness to word of mouth, are unknown. The player also faces a computer simulated competitor whose pricing, marketing, and capacity expansion strategies are likewise unknown. The game illustrates fundamental principles of strategy including the learning curve, time delays in capacity expansion, competitive dynamics, market saturation, and so on.
The game software consists of three parts: the microworld, the information system, and the game controls. The microworld is a mathematical model which represents the structure of F & B, including operations, capacity acquisition, the financial system, the market and customer base, competition, and so on. This model will generate dynamics over time as you make decisions. The information system reports to you the current state of the system and allows you to review the history of the firm. For example, you will be able to monitor the financial per formance of your firm quarter by quarter, and receive reports on operations, human re sources, the competition, etc. The controls allow you to make strategic and operational decisions to achieve your goals.