JSD Consulting

Retail Business Simulation Games

JSDC has developed, in conjunction with New Zealands leading retailers, a fully customisable Retail Business Simulation Game. The game is a first of its kind, being exclusively retail focused and delivering the most realistic retail educational experience available. The reviews after launch in late 2011 were superb and since then we have made further enhancements to the simulation.

Essentially the game, run over 2 or 3 days, has as its focus the development of store and/or category strategy, all while delegates are furiously engaged in competiive battles to "own" the retail environment in a created real life district of the country. The game participants are split into 4 competing retail teams or stores, each of which is battling for supremacy in the retail environment. All participants receive market, range, product and district data (all from the fictional district in which the trading takes place). The game plays out over 10 trading periods, each of which focuses on key retail skills. These 10 rounds are:

Goal Setting: What shall we do with the store?
Range: What will the perfect range look like?
Layouts:How shall we present this Range?
Pricing: What price architecture should we employ?
Promotion: What strategy, levers and mechanisms should we employ?
Suppliers: Who could we partner with?
Inventory: How much is enough and how can we balance this?
Execution: How can we really make it happen at the Point of Purchase?
People: What people structure do we need to deliver on the above?
Review: With the benefit of hindsight.......what would we change?

Each round delivers a new P&L, market share and EBIT performance data, directly comparable to each of the other competitors and traced back to decisions made in the round. In addition to the trading periods, participants deal with out of stocks, ill staff, customer complaints as well as being called upon to make decisions on equipment, fixtures and investment opportunities........in a nutshell, real retail with the real issues that confront retailers today.