In April 1981, People Express Airlines was launched - and a business phenomenon took off. By the beginning of 1986, People Express had grown to be the fifth largest airline in the United States, and had revenues of about $1 Billion per year. Its innova tive management style and structure were praised as the wave of the future, and com panies around the world rushed to imitate them. Yet by September of 1986, People Express was nearly bankrupt, and was acquired at the last minute by Texas Air.
What went wrong?
The People Express Management Flight Simulator gives you the opportunity to find out by 'flying' the company yourself. The simulator functions just as an aircraft simu lator does. You will take com mand of the firm and pilot it from startup to success. Each simulated time period you will make strategic and operational decisions, and receive feedback from your past decisions. You decide how fast to grow, how to set prices, how aggressively to advertise. Your hiring policies will influence morale, productivity, and turnover; your marketing efforts will shape the growth of demand; your competitors will fight back. You may face financial crisis or unexpected opportunity. You may go bankrupt, or grow to dominate the industry. But there is no winning or losing. The purpose of the simulator is to to give you insight into the issues raised by the case; to illustrate the difficulties of coordinating operations and strategy in a growth market; and to under stand the dynamic interconnections among a firm, its market, and its competi tors. The flight simulator is a laboratory in which you can systematically explore the conse quences of different strategies without risking the fortunes of the real enterprise.
The simulator is used successfully for management education and training at the Sloan School of Management at MIT and many other universities and companies. It is extremely easy to use, requiring little or no training. The simulator can be used in courses on strategy, operations, human resource management, organizational be havior, simulation, and operations research. It is effective as an introduction to princi ples of management, or as an integrative experience.
Hardware Requirements: The People Express Management Flight Simulator is available for IBM Compatibles running Windows version 3.xx or Win95. It runs on systems with at least 4 MByte RAM. The People Express Management Flight Simulator also runs on the Macintosh family of computers, from the Mac Classic up, including Powerbooks and Power Macs. It is System 7 and 7.5 compatible. It requires only 400K bytes of RAM. The software comes complete (no other applications are needed), and includes comprehensive documentation and instructions, a case study of People Express as background, and historical data on the company.