Decision Areas
The Decision Area is split into several theme based sub-categories (e.g. Demand, Production, etc.). Please refer to your decision making manual to determine where the decision making process should begin, and what the suggested order of the process is. Some areas should be filled out first, as the effect of those areas may influence some calculations and estimates elsewhere.
The actual decisions are entered into dedicated fields within their respective areas. There are three general types of decision making fields:
In the white cells you enter your decisions. Some decisions like price and personnel decisions are very important to make in every round, while some, such as investments, need to be made only in some rounds depending on the strategy of your team.
In the highlighted cells , you enter estimates of your sales, personnel turnover and so on. These estimations act as a basis for the budgets shown in the system.
Drop-down menus are used in certain decisions where there are some specific options to choose from.
The system automatically updates the budgets and calculations as you make decisions
It is important to note that there are two decision making areas. The first one is the Student Decision Making Area. Each team member has their own personal decision making area, where they can freely input any figures they want to see the effects they have on the projected results. The students always start on their own student area by default, when logging into the game. After satisfactory decisions have been made on the student area, they can easily be copied over to the second area type, the Team Decision Making Area, through use of the "Copy" button. Once copied, the decision set will be used to calculate the rounds results.
Alternatively, decisions can be made directly into the team area. To do this, a team member can move to the Team Area through use of the "Go" button. Any changes here are automatically recorded, and will be used to calculate the round results, if no other decisions are copied over. It is important to note that if a team member’s decisions are copied over the decision set made directly to the Team Area, there is no way to restore the originals, unless a player has "Imported" the set into their own Student Area.
Once the round deadline is passed, the game will automatically calculate results based on the final decisions found in the Team Decision Area. Again, be sure to have copied over the decision sets from the student areas before the deadline, if decisions are not made directly into the team area.