Capsim is the largest provider of business simulation software used by educators from various walks of life. I use their software named as Capstone to run an imaginary Censor manufacturing company. The reason to do this was to understand how business strategy is implemented in real world and how changes made to the strategy reflect to various parts of the company and thereby to the competitors and the industry.
Logging In
As I proceeded from registration to the Capstone software, I had to go through a lengthy 37 page document that detailed every single minutia of how the simulation works and how one can use it to better understand the business strategy.
I had trouble downloading the excel sheet and it had various macro related errors due to in-consistency with the excel version that I was using. So I had figure a way to by-pass these macro errors and then I was able to login and view the excel sheet successfully. This is an issue that could have been minimized by standardizing that all activity in Capstone will happen inside the web browser.
How to run a company or at least simulate it?
The user guide excellent brief of the perceptual map and how it works gave me a good understanding of what I was going to do. But I had to pick a strategy. I decided for the first rehearsal round, I wasn’t going to pick a strategy but just try to understand how the whole thing worked.
The first round, I took some time to randomly change numbers wherever possible to see what happened. Before submitting I did the round from the beginning to change the product’s attributes in the R&D sheet to match the customer buying criteria. I also added a new product called Kane but I couldn’t do anything with it in production sheet because this was not setup in the marketing yet.
In the other rounds, I tried to reduce the price on the low-end segment products to see if I can sell a lot more of them, thereby increasing my volume and also my profits. The