Results of the SAP Distribution Game

On the second day of the game, our team ended up in second to last place. I was pretty disappointed by this result because I was thinking that we were doing well while the game was active. The SAP system itself is definitely confusing and it took our team some time to adjust to how it worked and how we should go about using all the different tables. Regarding our rank, I think it was due to poor planning and not thinking the whole process through enough.

The first round we tried to figure out how changing our marketing costs and prices that our product was selling for would affect our net income. We came in third to last place so we did not do so well. The second round, we did the same concept but having the inventory be replenishable made a huge difference. The third round, we tried using no marketing at all and had our products be replenishable at different numbers. So, we had the more popular products have a higher number of replenishable inventory than the products that didn't sell a lot or any at all. This strategy made the most sense to our team, but it did not work out so well in terms of making more money.

The game being solely based on profit gave us a pretty clear idea of what business owners set their sights on when it comes to company goals. Most companies really only focus on having maximum profit, but they suffer in many other areas. I think wanting to have the most profit possible is a good goal, but a company also has to consider how this could affect their employees and also their stockholders. In a stockholder's point of view, wanting to make maximum profit is a good thing because the stockholder will be able to reap a bigger benefit. From an employee's standpoint, this is a bad thing. This most likely means that employee concerns and salaries are not as important. In the long run, this can most likely result in a huge loss of employees for the company.

When it comes to strengths and weaknesses, I think our team delegated responsibilities really well. We didn't waste any time figuring out who would be looking out for which screens. Our weakness is that we did not thoroughly think through how our changes in prices and marketing would affect our end net income.

Two outcomes I got from this activity is a beginning perspective of how companies decide to delegate responsibilities and then also how they determind prices and marketing. Determining the marketing and prices were definitely the hardest parts of the project. We did not know whether or not to raise or lower our prices and how it would affect our profit and net income. With the marketing dollars, it was hard to decide which regions should get the most money. All of these factors were challenges but were also a great way to teach us how real companies run their businesses on a day to day basis.