Management Simulation
The Fresh Connection
ISCS Consulting is the authorized facilitator of the Fresh Connection Management simulation in the East African region.
Concept
A high-performing organization needs the collaboration of team members from across the organization. Tearing down silos and creating the right cross-functional mindset, however, can be a serious challenge.
The Fresh Connection is a cross-functional business simulation which motivates your team to deliver optimal performance by using general management best practices from real-world situations. See for yourself how The Fresh Connection will effect positive and powerful change in your enterprise.
Why is The Fresh Connection different?
For a subject as vital as Value Chain Management, it is not enough to tell people what needs to be done. They must experience it. The Fresh Connection is a different way of learning that puts participants at the heart of a lifelike simulation so they can experience the impact of every decision they make, not just in their own ‘silo’ but across the business.
By team experience, participants measure their own performance against others and receive constant feedback from the professional trainers leading the simulation. Between rounds, participants reflect on what just happened, are introduced to new concepts and then go back to put what they have learned into practice in the next round. It is this Magic Circle that makes The Fresh Connection so powerful.
Companies who have experienced The Fresh Connection find it is not only highly effective but has a lasting impact on participants, delivering long-term benefits and making it the world’s best value chain management learning experience.
The best way to understand what makes The Fresh Connection unique is to experience it for yourself: sign up for our free trial and see if you have what it takes to create alignment and implement a successful supply chain strategy.
Simulation
Introduction
The Fresh Connection is an innovative web-based business simulation. It engages participants in making strategic decisions in the management of a manufacturing company of fruit juices. Working in teams of four, participants will represent the functional roles of sales, purchasing, supply chain and operations.
They will be confronted with various real-life, real-time dilemmas. Cross-functional understanding and collaboration are key components, as teams work together to turn the company around.
How does The Fresh Connection Work?
The Fresh Connection immerses its participants in turning around a manufacturer of fruit juices faced with declining performance. The management team must get the company back on track as soon as possible. It is a high-pressure environment in which effective management is the key to success. The management team has four roles:
- VP Purchasing: Responsible for selecting the right suppliers and agreeing SLAs with suppliers, including possible collaboration options.
- VP operations: Must decide on capacity in warehouses and production areas and approve investment in bottling lines and mixers. Can introduces various improvement projects. Has the ability to outsource outbound warehousing.
- VP Supply Chain: Manages inventories (safety stock and lot size settings), production intervals and the frozen period of production.
- VP Sales: Agrees SLAs with customers, manages the product and customer portfolio, forecasts demand and can introduce collaboration concepts.
Every decision a participant makes has trade-offs, both within and across roles, so participants will only succeed if they align all the disciplines. As the simulation evolves it becomes clear that strategy is essential for success – and that the strategy must be deployed to functional levels and below to be effective. Winning is about generating the best ROI for the business while still managing your own team’s Key Performance Indicators and targets. The Fresh Connection is designed for any professional who works as part of cross-functional teams along the value chain. This can include:
- General managers
- Operations managers
- Production managers
- Supply chain managers
- Logistics managers
- Warehouse managers
- Sales/Marketing managers
- Financial managers
- Procurement managers/buyers
- Planners/forecasters
Learning objectives & Topics
Imagine you are:
- A production company who is not able to execute the company strategy on the tactical level
- A wholesale company struggling with silo thinking, unable to create alignment along the various roles in the value chain
- A logistics service provider who wants to fit the customer’s shoes in order to increase the effectiveness of his sales force
The Fresh Connection learning experience is extremely versatile. Its modular design enables it to be tailored to challenge all hierarchical levels within an organization and fulfill the training needs of professionals from multiple professional backgrounds.
What will you learn with The Fresh Connection?
Depending on the specific group being trained, we can vary everything from the complexity of the simulation itself to the number of rounds used.
Whether you are a production or wholesaling company managing your own operations, or a logistics service provider who wants to ‘get inside the customer’s head’, you can use The Fresh Connection to:
- Build internal or external teams
- Understand the importance and relevance of a company’s strategy
- Translate strategy into action
- Learn to ‘speak the same language’ with other value chain partners, internally or externally
- Experience the power of a professional and well-structured Sales & Operations Planning process
- Appreciate cross-functional trade-offs in the value chain
- Experience the power of a well designed set of KPIs
The Beer Game
ISCS Consulting facilitates the Beer Game (the beer distribution game), an experiential business simulation game created to demonstrate a number of key Principles of Management.
The simulation is undertaken by teams of at least four players, in an environment of heated competition. A debriefing session then follows to review the results of each team and discuss the lessons learnt.
The purpose of the simulation is to understand the distribution side of the dynamics of multi-echelon management. It enables participants to experience typical coordination problems of management in which information sharing and collaboration does not exist.
The Beer Game is definitely a great way to get your team to effortlessly appreciate and learn the benefits of information sharing and collaboration among themselves and with their external partners in the organization!