A few months ago, I received the typical email sent from my university:

Are you a university student, and do you want to change the world? Would you like to understand how a company works and learn how to make decisions related to its management?

And as a good restless person, I quickly forwarded the email to two other people who might be more restless than me and would surely be attracted by this proposal of intentions.

And so it was that graduates in Industrial Design Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Translation and Interpreting came together to start a challenge completely unknown to them.

But what is GMC?

Global Management Challenge is the world’s largest simulation-based business strategy and management competition. Using the competition format challenges participants to manage companies in a highly competitive and challenging context. Highly contrasted model, certified and used in business schools and universities to train their students in business management.

Participating teams must make decisions as if they were the company’s board of directors. Initially, they receive historical information on their company’s decisions and results for the last five quarters. Based on the analysis of the information, they must define their strategy and make successive decisions over the next five quarters.

Decisions are made at the board level. In each quarter a total of 77 numerical decisions must be made affecting the areas of Marketing, Operations, Human Resources, and Finance, these decisions include:

• Advertising (corporate and products)
• Pricing (products and markets)
• Transportation (containers to distributors)
• Quality (R&D, improvements, assembly, materials)
• Operations (materials, maintenance, shifts, web)
• International Trade (EU, NAFTA, Internet)
• Commercial (recruitment, commission, support)
• Environment (environmental impacts)
• Personnel (recruitment, training, salary)
• Finance (shares, dividends, loans)

The winning team is the one that manages to give the highest return to its company’s shareholders at the end of the fifth quarter of management, this is measured in terms of share value, modified by shares issued and repurchased, as well as dividends paid to shareholders.

In the Valencian Community, 32 teams competed, divided into 4 groups of 8 teams each. After 5 weeks of decisions, the two best teams in each group would advance to the regional final.

My team was lucky or rather, we managed to be one of the teams that qualified for the regional final.

But we did not always have the confidence to go to the final, as you can see in the graph, we did not start very well.

We are the green color, at the beginning we made bad decisions, we reduced the price of the products too much, by doing this, the production did not satisfy the demand and therefore we did not supply the market. As a consequence, consumers were rating our products negatively on the internet and this influenced one of the most important parameters, IP (Investment Performance).

However, as the weeks went by, Outreaching was improving and understanding new concepts that we did not know and we qualified for the regional finals.

We started the contest badly, maybe the logistics were not correct, now we are preparing for the final, so as not to make those mistakes, also now we have more knowledge and not only thanks to the contest but also thanks to our respective training.

The final is this Thursday, March 31, all day long, wish us luck!