MGMT 430

 

MGMT 430 is the business capstone class that all business students are required to take before they graduate. It is a culmination of all the information you've learned in your core business classes and more. There are three integral parts to the class: case write-ups, a month-long case competition, and the capstone simulation.

 

The case competition is like any case comp, except every team was given one month to come up with a recommendation instead of the usual 48 hours. The company we were providing a recommendation for this quarter was zulily. There were 59 teams that competed this quarter, and although our team did not move on to the next round, we felt that we had learned a lot about using frameworks to analyze and understand zulily.

 

The other integral part of the course is a group assignment/simulation where each group is a company in the electric sensor industry and is required to make R&D, marketing, production, and finance decisions relating to our products. There are five different segments (low end, traditional, size, performance, and high end) and we must come up with a strategy to pursue that will lead us to success. We compete with 5 other teams (one team is the computer), and we are Andrews 0.

 

Each team is given points based on 10 different circles, as shown below. You can get a max of 100 points for each circle, for up to 1000 points each round. Below is a screenshot of our points for the first each of the 5 rounds. Each circle is extremely complicated and there are numerous factors that go into how many points you get for each round - I learned a lot about how to make overall business decisions in a group and how to compromise and solve conflicts.