Mike's Bikes Simulation Reflection

a) What strategy did your team decide to adopt during the renewal stage of the simulation?

Our team chose a best-cost provider strategy.

b) How did the strategy work?

The strategy started out a little rocky -as it normally does. However, we got everything under control and had a couple of rollovers to analyze where we were at relative to the competition. Eventually we determined that renewing a organziation is more difficult than it seems and it would have helped to have some more support from Mike's Bike and more time to figure out how to continue to keep the strategy going. We determined that too many changes was not the way to go. It was best to keep the changes to a minimum and when we made changes we made them incremently and slowly. We found that we had quite a bit of cash that we needed to use and so we used this cash to create a new bike line which helped jump start our company.

c) What concepts from the course did you see reflected in the game play?

It seemed that everything was slow and in decline in this part of the simulation. There was a need to keep a close eye on the competition prior to making any decisions. It was not a good idea to copy the competition. For example, all groups entered the BMX market right away, but only one group (the one that made the best first decisions) captured the market. The rest of us were left in the dust to pick up the pieces. There was also a need to change a number of things (not all at once) but over time. For example, bike's that we've had for years were revitalized with new specs and pricing. Change was the key to making the company stay afloat.

d) What could your team do differently if you were to play the simulation again?

Pay more attention to the competition and try to think about what he/she is doing. Scenario planning and what if would have helped us stay away from disasters that we would later being trying to dig ourselves out of.