WHAT WE DO

Commercial Excellence

Using business simulations to help people understand the commercial consequences of their operational decisions

What We Do

We believe sound business intelligence delivers an improved financial performance and better developed organisational leadership. IDG’s commercial excellence offering includes four key dimensions.

We work with our clients to identify where gaps in organisational capability exist and look to design bespoke interventions to address the identified development need.

This could be one or more of the product segments identified below.

Our experience is clear, this type of engagement delivers the best results for your organisation when based around team working and active collaboration.

Please watch the film below and then read on to learn more.

Overview of the “The Business Challenge”

The Business Challenge is a board-game simulation of a company selling yachts. Facilitators guide participants through the operating sequence of the simulation and provide input around strategy (including Ansoff, Porter and others) and the effective measurement of commercial results using both financial and non-financial KPIs.

In a competitive market, managers must decide on their company’s objectives and procurement and sales strategies. They create financial plans to support the strategies. The business environment is dynamic so plans must be reviewed regularly. Managers must assess market potential and competitive positioning when investing in new products or expanding into new markets. The penetration into each market depends on the investment in sales and marketing and on the pricing strategy.

The company is financed by shareholders, loans, and trade credit. Shareholders, bankers and creditors require regular, accurate accounts and realistic business forecasts. The bank is particularly strict in assessing its risks, demanding that all company reports are available when negotiating loans.

Throughout the game, the results of all companies are compared using asset management, risk management and profitability ratios.

Development Needs Met

Click on a tab below to learn more about each of these.

IDG Business simulations are experiential learning, providing colleagues the opportunity to respond to high intensity challenges. Business simulations build the capabilities needed for exemplar strategy execution. They create a deep sense of ownership for the strategy motivating action back in the workplace. IDG’s business simulations are typically board games which involve participants working in small teams, often in competition with each other.

We see increasingly more and more companies turning to simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with one or more of the following business challenges:

Implementing a new strategy.
Driving innovation and strategy execution.
Improving commercial awareness and business acumen.
Designing and transforming operations into business results.
Focusing leadership development on front line operations.
Embedding culture change aligned with strategy.

Within minutes of being placed in a simulation colleagues are wrestling with risks, issues and decisions they must make. A year can be compressed into a day. And competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

IDG’s Board simulations are a unique and highly effective experiential approach to learning: they place colleagues in real life, problem-based scenarios. The most effective board simulations are customised to the client and industry. We also offer a broad suite of industry specific simulations that may be adapted to specific client needs.

Through the program, teams of four to six colleagues manage a simulated company and practice real-life decision making in a safe environment. Colleagues receive feedback and analysis of the outcomes of their decisions and strategies. To maximize impact and relevance for colleagues the simulation can be tailored or highly customised to the client’s business and strategic priorities.

Strategic thinking and execution demands understanding the alignment, engendering the right culture and attitude and building the skills and capabilities.

Business simulations, both industry and customised together with experiential-based solutions develop and change high-leverage behaviors and enable effective strategic thinking and execution.

IDG helps organisations become better at strategic thinking and execution by leveraging business simulations to create a workforce that is aligned behind the strategy, has the right attitude to approach it with purpose and urgency and is able to quickly master the capabilities

Being and entrepreneur is exciting, challenging and can be risky! You need to be creative, to be able to hold your nerve and create a high performing team environment.

Being an entrepreneur means you understand your customer needs and innovate new ways that create value. It is a core capability that allows firms to sustain competitive advantage and grow. It is a skill that can be learned and mastered. It can be made a part of an organisations culture but it requires experimentation and uncertainty. It requires looking at customers and markets in new ways and an ability maintain your operation today while directing resources to discover tomorrow’s. Most of all it requires a willingness to challenge the assumptions that may have made the company successful in the first place.

At IDG we believe that by developing the following natural personality traits you can start to think and act like an entrepreneur, these are :

Optimism and vision
Initiative and desire
Drive, persistence and resilience
Smart and motivated leadership

Combining these traits with great communication and listening skills, being bold and creative and ultra organised will support your desire for success for your organisation and yourself.

In order to execute the strategy effectively you must have business acumen and commercial awareness.

How well do you know your organisation and the external environment in which your organisation operates?

How often do you identify and analyse trends in your competitors behavior?

How are you proactively making money for your organisation and do you have the financial acumen to understand your balance sheet?

IDG can develop your ability to apply understanding of the company and its industry to improve effectiveness and profitability. Individuals behaving commercially will:

Base decisions primarily upon the benefits to the business
Concentrate on delivering results which bring the clearest commercial benefit
Demonstrate an understanding of how the different parts of the organisation work together
Ensure their own work is in line with the direction of the organisation
Identify opportunities to gain commercial advantage by exploiting competitors’ weaknesses
Be able to use sound financial logic to propose a convincing case to influence the business direction
Keep up to date with commercial developments within the industry
Control costs and thinks in terms of profit and loss and added value

Becoming more commercially aware and demonstrating your business acumen means you and your business have every opportunity to succeed.