Monday 31 October 2011

Hither Thither

~ So I have this 14 day Diwali vacation. And a lot of my friends from college keep asking me as to how I am spending my time. For a person who can sleep 15 hours a day, you really don't need to have a plan on how to spend your 14 day vacation!

~ When I came back home after my third semester, I weighed 78 kilos. That is the leanest I have been in a decade. My mom took it as a personal challenge to get me back to my normal self. 10 days and 8 kilos later, I think she has comfortably won.

~ Diwali has just got over and as has been the trend since the last few years, there was less of noise and more of light this year too. I read somewhere that Diwali is called the festival of light, because that is precisely how your wallet feels after you purchase firecrackers!

~ I went to the opthalmologist to get my eyes tested. Keeping in trend with our inflationary environment, my eye number has also jumped up by 50%. It is at a scary negative 4.50 now! Scary because it reminds me of an incident where a friend of mine turned down a guy she really liked just because he had a negative 6. Can you believe that? Her argument was that since she was a negative 7, their kids would be born blind! Dear reader, such a crazy woman exists and she blogs here

~ I have this free messaging scheme, but on festivals I am charged a buck per message. So in order to circumvent this and still wish people, I send them messages a day early, which reads something like

"I though I'd wish the very special people first, so here goes - Happy Diwali :)"

Monday 24 October 2011

Capstone Business Simulation Tips

Since it has become fashionable for most B schools to have the Capstone simulation, here are some tips and tricks that might help you to crack the game.

1. Introduce all your new products in year 1 itself.

2. Compete in 3-4 segments only. Don't compete in all 5!

3. Exit the performance segment. The margins are low.

4. Have 3 products in the low segment and time their introduction in such a way that you have a new version in the market, every 4 months.

5. Automate as soon as possible. The ideal automation levels are (10-low, 8-traditional, 7-rest)

6. Use conservative forecasts in the marketing tab and optimistic ones in the production tab. This will help you to not be at the mercy of Big Al.

7. $1400 is all you need to maintain your promotion levels at 100%

8. Spend $5000 per employee on recruitment costs and 80 hours of training, right from the first week itself.

9. In TQM, spend $1500 on each activity for the first three weeks.

10. In labor negotiation, be at the upper end on all aspects. This way you will hurt your competitors the most.

Post Script - If you found these helpful (or otherwise), please click on the ads. It will go a long way in helping me recover my tuition fees! ;)

Post Post Script - My site content is found to be inappropriate by the Google Ads guys. Ya whatever!