Introduction

I played as the President in Back Bay Battery simulation, my goal is to make accurate sales forecast and
R&D investment to maximum the accumulate revenue and profit. The difficult part is that price pressures
forced the company to maintain a very lean business model with tight reins on R&D spending. In order to
run the business successfully and not get fired, I need to be proficient in making decisions which need
several strategies to support it.

I tried several times of this simulation with different strategies, the best practice simulation’s total
revenue is 153.5M. Although it is not an amazing outcome, Back Bay Battery gained profit when the
overall sales in AGM or Super capacitors, and overcome the recession years. According to the operating
profit chart, the situation might get better than all the R&D investment should boost greater results after
several years to meet customer desired, owing to it needs at least four years into the same R&D projects
can be a breakthrough development. However, the performance still has a lot of room for growth.

This report explains the strategic objectives, feasibility, and disclose the impact on the financial results.
Also reflect to different practices might leads to better results.

Strategy types

My main purpose is to increase AGM market share, turn Supercapacitors into positive profit to maximum
the accumulative revenue. To achieve this goal, I apply the following strategies:

Increase customer satisfaction in the two most Influential market

Low Cost Leader:

As price is also a very important feature which will affect customer purchase intention. According to
market trends and the development of new technologies, AGM batteries will pretty much grow year on
year in the market for Automobile, Marine and Warehouse sectors. It means the market will only accept
lower and better features for AGM if we have to maintain the market share.

In order to achieve this low cost leader initiative we have to invest in R&D features like Energy Density,
Recharge Cycle, Self-Discharge, and Recharge time along with process improvement to make sure the cost
per unit kept reducing over time. This in turn would help lower the prices of the batteries.

Reflection

I learned several lessons from Back Bay Battery simulation, these lessons inspired me to improve in
decision making.
The first key lesson is that there are complicated components in sales forecast. Past revenue rates cannot
guarantee the future revenues. The wrong forecast will negatively affect the R&D budget. One way to
avoid this is to research and development R&D spending on the revenue of the past year, rather than the
upcoming year.

The second lesson is that I should not put too much effort in saturated market. Although AGM showed the
greatest competitive advantage in Marine sector, it is already in the saturated market for AGM and would
much rather prefer supercapacitors, which did not have plenty of room for potential opportunities at the
current time.

The third lesson is the more information one can get, the more accurate decisions they can make. When
playing the simulation, it is hard to make decision as the news occur too sudden. It takes time and large
amount of costs to recover from the shrinking market. The better approach is to apply the conservative
attitude toward these uncertain events, and choose one feature at the beginning and stick to it. Changing
strategies in the middle will decrease the competitive advantage because the other R&D projects have to
start from zero.

Conclusion

The situations are more complicated and unpredictable in the real word, so it is more important to
analyse the data to support the right decisions. For example, Porter's Five Forces is very useful to tell the
trend of the industry and which parts should the President should be aware of, SWOT Analysis can
demonstrate the firm's own strength and its comparison with its competitors, also focus on changes in
the external environment and the possible impact on the business. To sum up, proficient in collecting
accurate information, and applying analytical tools, will help effective decision-making.