Strategy Dynamics
07 September 2008

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People Express 2000

In April 1981, People Express Airlines was launched - and a business phenomenon took off. By the beginning of 1986, People Express had grown to be the fifth largest airline in the United States, and had revenues of about $1 billion per year. Its innovative management style and structure were praised as the wave of the future, and companies around the world rushed to imitate them. Yet by September of 1986, People Express was nearly bankrupt, and was acquired at the last minute by Texas Air.

What went wrong?

The People Express Management Flight Simulator gives you the opportunity to find out by 'flying' the company yourself. The simulator functions just as an aircraft simulator does. You will take command of the firm and pilot it from start-up to success - or failure. In each simulated time period you make strategic and operational decisions, and receive feedback from your past decisions.

You decide how fast to grow, how to set prices, how aggressively to advertise. Your hiring policies will influence morale, productivity and turnover; your marketing efforts will shape the growth of demand; your competitors will fight back. You may go bankrupt, or grow to dominate the industry. But there is no winning or losing. The purpose of the simulator is to give you insight into the issues raised by the case; to illustrate the difficulties of co-ordinating operations and strategy in a growth market; and to understand the dynamic interconnections among a firm, its market, and its competitors. The flight simulator is a laboratory in which you can systematically explore the consequences of different strategies without risking the fortunes of the real enterprise.

This simulator is used successfully for management education and training at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, London Business School, and many other universities and companies. It is extremely easy to use from a computing standpoint, but it does benefit from skilled facilitation by an individual knowledgeable in business strategy. The simulator can be used to support courses on strategy, operations, human resource management, organisational behaviour, simulation and operations research. It is effective as an introduction to the principles of management, and is especially valuable as a way of integrating the various management disciplines for a business school, management trainee or general business audience.

This popular management Flight Simulator by Professor John Sterman at MIT is now compatible with Windows Operating Systems from Windows 95 upwards and benefits from the addition of a "Game Notepad" to enable users to easily record their results and an additional table of all public variables for ease of analysis.

Feature List

How the game works

Players run the People Express 2000 simulation over a simulated time period of 10 years, with decisions being taken each quarter. When the simulation is advanced their decisions are applied to the underlying dynamic simulation and the results are shown in the reports, graphs and tables.

Reporting system

Seven reports show current data - summary, breakeven analysis, capacity and load, employees, financial, market research and stock price and earnings. These are supplemented with graphs and tables so that teams can see how indicators have changed over time.

Game Notepad

Use the Game Notepad to record strategies. In conjunction with easy copy and paste facilities for Reports, Graphs and Tables this makes presentation of results simple.

Save Comments with games

By default, comments in the game notepad can be saved with the game making it easy to create new scenarios for students.

Table of User Decisions

Makes it easy to keep track of your actions.

Table of all public variables

Analysis of game results is made easy with this additional feature. Results are presented in the same order as the reports / tables but on copying to Excel or similar spreadsheet can be re-ordered to enable straightforward analysis.

Custom Graphs

Any item appearing in a table can be represented as a graph - simply double click on the table heading.

Windows compatibility

People Express is written for Microsoft Windowstm and runs on all versions of Windows from Windows95 through to Vista.

Global Strategy Dynamics provides a variety of licensing arrangements for business use in academic, executive education and corporate training events. If you could use a simulation in class why not ask for a no obligation quote for your event?

Download an Evaluation Copy of People Express 2000 today to see how easy it is to install and run.

 

Download a demo
or buy a personal licence
for People Express 2000

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Sample report

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Sample table

Sample graph