Making the Grade, BP Educational Services, CD-ROM

Teaching Business & Economics, Autumn 1998 by Clay, Paula

Making the Grade, BP Educational Services, CDROM, 40 for first copy, 10 for subsequent ones, PO Box 934, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH8 8YY, Tel: 01202 244041, E-mail: bpes bp.com.

Making the grade is a CDROM simulated role-play, business decision-making 'game' produced by BP Educational services. The player (or team of players) act out the role of a newly appointed general manager to a chemical company, whose responsibilities include the planning, construction and running of a new plant.

Heavily endowed with wordprocessed documentation, which is essential reading before the game can be played, the CDROM medium provides some high quality graphics which give the game a realistic, if somewhat `Dallas style' feeling.

The game can be played on two levels, easy or complex, and for those players who do not have much time to get down to planning and construction, there is a further option to enable the player(s) to go straight to a production simulation arena. Here, day-to-day decisions need to be made on-the-hoof, environmental issues rear up out of nowhere, and there are endless telephone calls and meetings needed to assess, for example, whether the company will expand into export markets or offer extensive credit to customers with large orders. The whole game is reassuringly helpful to the novice decision-maker, who is given prompted advice by the relevant personnel. The final decisions resting of course with the user and their business flair.

The game is very sophisticated and covers many areas which are beyond the bounded scope of most modules within standard GCSE, A-Level and GNVQ courses. Whilst all of these courses would benefit from this additional useful resource, it would lend itself equally well to HNC and HND Business Studies courses. Listed below are some of the main areas which the simulation addresses:

Main issues

Decision-making

Team working

Human relations

Environmental factors

Stakeholder issues particularly local residents

Secondary issues

Recruitment and Selection

Delegation

Prioritising

Personnel contracts

Health and safety issues

Production scheduling

Distribution channels

Production down-time and plant maintenance

Return on capital invested

Market share

Sales trend analysis

Market pricing

International markets

The simulation cleverly utilises random problem generation to enable the game to be played more than once by the same player without duplicating the previous game. This is fortuitous since the novice user really needs at least two or three warm-up trials before entering into the spirit of this serious business venture.

This brings me back to the word processed user and teaching documentation supplied on the CD-ROM, and a note of warning that this cannot be overlooked. Before beginning the game it is essential that the teacher has read these instructions, and printed off the relevant fact recording sheets and the CV's of the prospective project managers. Indeed, if there were to be a criticism of the game it would be that this factor indicates some oversight in its otherwise wholly on-line interactive nature, and that the user attention is not drawn sufficiently to this critical point.

Once over this hurdle, and armed with CV's, the user is given a virtual office consisting of telephone, meeting facilities, email and a virtual filing-cabinet in the guise of a hard disk storage area which records all decisions made. The game begins with an event requiring the general manager's attention, and offers the general manager meeting platforms or telephone conversations with other managers before insisting on a decision which must be recorded through a multiple-choice style, email reply system. The decisions can be reviewed easily through the hard disk area, and plans can be monitored in the same way.

The format of the game is to continue to supply the user(s) with problems and facts which, when used as a basis for decision making, will reflect their business performance.

This interactive dialogue facilitated through the virtual office, ensures that the user quite rapidly learns to use the system features, and whilst the on-screen guidance is not as clear as many other Windows applications, there is always some on-line help if the user is struggling.

Whilst this method of delivery ensures a consistent approach to the game, there are features within the software which leave the user feeling slightly out of control. One is the pause button, which really does not allow the user to pause at the exact moment when they might want to, and another is the length of time between being asked some decisions. On more than one occasion I was left wondering if the software had gone to sleep on me!

Making the Grade is a highly sophisticated software experience. The thrust of the simulation is to stress the interaction of business individuals and departments and as such the game should ideally be set up in the classroom as a group activity. It would also lend itself to a competition between groups of students within each teaching group. Further the simulation could be used as both an icebreaker at the start of an academic year, and on an ongoing basis to assist in the understanding of the interrelationships of business principles which often appear disjointed over a two-year course.