A team of five Purdue University Calumet management students tied for the top ranking in a world-wide, online, simulated business competition involving 4,247 teams from 288 colleges and universities.
Comprising the Purdue Calumet team were Mary A. Gross of Valparaiso, Sarah Moen of Hobart, David Ramsey of Hammond, Aaron Shultz of St. John and Allauddin Abdulghani of Glendale Heights, Ill. They collaborated in The Business Strategy Game, published and marketed by McGraw-Hill/Irwin, to achieve a perfect score in overall performance relative to managing their virtual shoe company, Team Amazing Shoes.
The students teamed up during a senior level, strategic management capstone course taught last fall by Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship Derek Ruth. The course is part of Purdue Calumet’s experiential learning initiative, in which students integrate traditional and applied learning in a real world manner.
Student teams competing in the game apply best business practices to develop competitive strategies for successfully operating their simulated shoe company.
“Overall performance is a combined score,” Ruth said, “that gives 50 percent weight to two different and broad measures: teams’ places within their current industry and whether or not they are meeting shareholder expectations.”
Such performance categories as Earnings per Share, Return on Equity, Stock Price, Credit Rating and Image Rating are scored.
Each week, the student teams input hundreds of decisions relating to such aspects of business management as assessing market conditions, determining how to respond to competitor actions, forging long term strategies and direction, and forecasting upcoming sales volumes. More specifically, decision-making affects human resource benefits and training, financial management, production management, product development, sales projections, pricing and marketing—all with respect to selling shoes globally in internet, retail and private label markets.
“Each week represents a year of business,” Ruth said. “At the end of each week, each team’s business decisions are run through a complex simulation program that takes into account such factors as exchange rates, prices, shoe quality and competitor decision-making. Simulated company performance reports are generated and accessed by the teams. The simulation is based on real world research and experience; it is designed to be as realistic as possible.”
Eight other Purdue Calumet student teams also competed last fall and placed 19 times in the Global Top 100 List. Assistant Professor of Strategic Management Arifin Angriawan also taught sections of the Strategic Management 45000 course.
In 2010, a team of students in Angriawan’s class achieved a No. 1 world-wide ranking in the Return on Equity category during the week of Nov. 22-28.
