simana · Business Acumen
Participant Guide
Business Acumen Guide
How to play the company management simulation — departments, decision rounds and criteria.
Before you start
Get into your session in three steps. This part is the same for every simulation.
- Sign in. Log in at simana.tr with the username and password your organization gave you.
- Open the Simulations dashboard. Every simulation assigned to you appears as a card.
- Pick your card. Choose Start, Continue or View Results by its status — your progress saves automatically.
How to play
You and your teammates are appointed to run a company. You compete in the same market as the other teams over several rounds: each round you decide in four departments, upload your decisions, and read the outcome at the end of the round.
| Department | What you decide |
|---|---|
| R&D | Design products against customer expectations: revise, launch, retire |
| Marketing | Price, sales forecast, promotion and sales budgets |
| Production | Production volume, capacity and automation investment, inventory |
| Finance | Borrowing and cash strategy; income statement, balance sheet and cash flow |
| Board | Every financial statement and indicator of the company |
| Summary | Review the decisions one last time and upload them |
How a round works
- Read the market. The perception map, customer purchasing criteria, and what your competitors did last round.
- Decide in each department. Enter your decisions in R&D, Marketing, Production and Finance. They act on each other.
- Review on the Summary screen. Every decision is gathered on one screen; this is your last check before uploading.
- Upload as a team decision. A user decision is only your own record and does not move the company. The team decision is what counts.
- Read the results. Two reports close the round: a Sector Report carrying every company’s data, and a Scoreboard showing your own performance.
What the criteria measure
Which measures count, and how much each weighs, is set with the scenario and can differ by organization. The five below are the standard build, and their default weights are equal — 20% each.
| Measure | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Sales revenue | The share of the market you took, as turnover |
| Profit | What is left after cost; the test of your cost decisions |
| Share price | How the company looks from outside, cumulative performance |
| Contribution margin | Profitability per unit; the distance between price and cost |
| Emergency loan | The high-interest debt you fall back on when cash runs out. Lower is better; zero is best |
These measures work against each other. Cutting cost lifts profit but loses customer appreciation; aggressive investment grows revenue but drains cash and pushes you into the emergency loan. What the simulation measures is whether you saw that trade-off.
Playing as a team
A team of three or four runs the company. Every member can save a decision, so uploading has to be coordinated.
- A user decision is only your own record on your own device; it does not change the company result.
- A team decision is the one you agreed on and uploaded together; that is what moves the company.
- Because every member can save, decisions can overwrite each other. The system takes the last team decision uploaded.
- If you do not like an outcome, "back to previous round data" lets you start over.
Team mode is a negotiation: defending a decision together is harder than making it alone, and that is the part that teaches.
Good to know
- The simulation runs over several rounds; a decision taken in one round is read in the ones that follow.
- You can save your decisions more than once before the round closes; that is what reduces the risk of a mishap.
- The industry scenario is chosen before the session: microchip, FMCG, electric vehicle, biomed or aerospace.
Run the company, see what the decision costs.