The AIMA Pune trip

Went with a gang of friends to Pune for 2 days for a management simulation game conducted by AIMA. The event happened at Singhad Institute of Management in a serene village called Kondhwa outside Pune. So, we started from Mumbai on Monday evening by the Deccan Queen. The train has a number of firsts and onlys to its credit, like

The first train to be certified ISO 9000 in India.

The only train with a cafeteria, where you can actually sit and have food as you do in a hotel.

The route between Mumbai and Pune is one of the most beautiful ones in India, as far as I have travelled, where the tracks cut across the Western Ghats. During monsoon, which it was this week, it offers you some breathtaking views of valley, waterfalls and mountains all in fresh green. The added pleasure of travelling by the Deccan Queen is that you can enjoy all this as you relish your cutlet and coffee as you do in a bakery down the street.

The game was conducted by AIMA on a software that they have developed called Chanakya. The software was robust. There was not a glitch in it throughout the 2 days that we played. The game was a board room simulator in which there were 4 members per team and each had to play the role as a CEO, CFO, COO and CMO.

Each four member team was a company. In each group there were 8 teams, which made it essentially as 8 companies competing for the same market. We had to take decisions on the operations, marketing and financial aspects each quarter, and the game was played over 5 quarters.

The winning criteria was the book value per share, which made the way you managed your finances more crucial than the way you invested in technology, produced efficiently or marketed the product. This winning criteria, made the reading of the seemingly simple Balance sheet, Income statement and the cash flow critical after every quarter. We felt that we should have had one of the CAs from our class in our team as they would have helped us in reading these statements in a jiffy.

The game helped us realise, at least now, how much of financial accounting had been misunderstood by us. We made a stupid mistake of not issuing equity shares during the 2nd quarter of the game when the chance came our way and hence not capitalising the share premium into the reserves and surplus, which would have improved our book value. This made us go from 3rd to 8th rank after round 2, the end of day 1.

The next day, we had to play 3 more rounds and somehow jump from 8th to the 4 th position to scrape through to the next round. We did play a little better on day 2 than on day 1, and managed to move from 8 to 6 to 5 and stayed at 5.

Of the 8 teams from NM, one managed to get to the regional finals and they have also ended up being the regional winners, who will play in the national finals at Coimbatore in October. Hope they win at Coimbatore and become the national champions.

Overall, it was a great learning that made us realise that small decisions that you make in the board room has a significant impact on the company, which makes business seem simple yet remain complex.