Case Study: Retail Game, Financial Awareness Programme
(Note: this game is suitable for all high street retailers)
Client requirements:
Our client wanted an interactive and engaging Financial Awareness Course to train regional managers and managers from their manufacturing facility.
The delegates were about to be given more responsibility for using and interpreting financial information.
Course details:
The game our client chose was a two day event. The course programme consisted of a three hour formal financial awareness seminar followed by the reinforcing and extension of the learning through participating in the game.
Throughout the two days our client’ own management accounts were used in the debriefs to ensure the delegates could use the learning to relate back to the real documents they were using at work. In addition the published accounts of the our client group were shown to the delegates so that they could see how the information they were to receive contributed to the information shown to the shareholders.
Game details:
The game was played by four teams of 4 players (16 delegates in total). So far approximately 64 delegates have attended the programme since 2008. Each team was responsible for running a business consisting of four shops of varying sizes.
They had to make quality decisions, such as the number of staff to employ, food quality, range and opening hours. They then submitted their decisions to our team who fed them in to our programme to determine their level of sales.
In addition teams were allowed to expand their range of shops by bidding against each other for new units that became available each round.
The teams also had the ability to manage their cash position to make the business more flexible and were faced with the problems of trying to manage receipts from customers, payments to landlords and payments to suppliers.
At the end of each round the teams produced a Profit & Loss Account to assess their progress.
Course coverage:
The following technical details were covered throughout the two days:
- Profit & Loss Accounts (Income Statements)
- Balance Sheets
- The Accruals Principle & Depreciation
- Basic interpretation of accounts including Gross & Operating Margins
- The importance of getting the customer offering right
- Cash management & its impact on the business
- The impact of competition in the market
- Budgeting & Budgetary Control
- Basic variance analysis
Return on Investment:
The initial course feedback from delegates gave a 100% satisfaction rating on the programme’s aims of improving the engagement with Financial Information. Following the course the managers felt confident that they were ready to start using the financial information that was to be provided by the business.