PremierSim
A multi-day executive simulation in which management teams run Premier Print Co., maker of a groundbreaking household 3D printer, wearing the marketing hat and the operations hat at once across five international markets.
Two C-suite seats, one company, one week
PremierSim is the umbrella executive simulation built on the Premier Print Co. case. It fuses the operations and logistics dimension and the marketing strategy dimension of the same company into a single competitive experience, so teams feel how a warehouse decision limits marketing reach and how a pricing move ripples back into the supply chain.
Integrated by design
Marketing and operations share one engine and one bottom line. No functional decision survives in isolation: the cross-dependencies are the lesson.
A breakthrough product
Every team runs a rival Premier Print Co. selling the same groundbreaking household 3D printer, fighting for share across five distinct country markets.
A balanced scorecard
Teams are not judged on profit alone. A balanced scorecard blends profit, ROE, market share and cash health, and ranks them against every rival.
Deciding under uncertainty
Incomplete information, competitor moves, and supplier and transport reliability: teams own the consequences of every choice, quarter after quarter.
Welcome to Premier Print Co.
A fast-growing company built around a groundbreaking household 3D printer, one that prints objects, materials and even toys at home. Teams inherit a company that has already been trading for a year, and have to make it profitable from there on.
The mandate
The brief is blunt: make Premier Print Co. profitable. Teams take the controls as the executive committee and steer the company through the live rounds, setting prices, building brands, sourcing materials, manufacturing across countries and moving goods through five markets.
The challenge: balance growth, margin and cash while every functional move collides with the others. Entering a new market wins share but dilutes margin; cutting price wins volume but bleeds cash. Perform on the scorecard, or watch a rival pull ahead.
Starting position
| Starting cash | $1,000,000 |
| Pre-played history | 4 rounds |
| Existing brands | 2 PremierPrint |
| Round length | 90 days (one quarter) |
Every company starts identical: same product, same cash, same history. The engine pre-runs the first four rounds with seed decisions so that each team inherits a year of operating history before taking over. From there, only decisions set them apart.
Five markets, five segments, one product family
The world spans five distinct country markets —each with its own demand, price sensitivity and retailer landscape— crossed by five customer segments that buy for very different reasons.
Five customer segments
Expert buyers
Demanding early adopters who scrutinise the specifications.
Single-person households
Buying driven by convenience and by the space available at home.
Professionals
They value performance and reliability for work.
High income
Low price sensitivity; they pay for design and features.
The wider market
The broad mainstream: the volume battleground.
One product family, three categories
Two optional extra regions
On top of the five active regions, the scenario can open two additional markets to lengthen the game or raise the ambition of the international expansion.
Each region carries its own manufacturing cost and its own demand profile, so where you make and where you sell are two separate strategic questions.
What participants take away
PremierSim is a capstone integration experience. It forces marketing knowledge and operations knowledge to connect into a single, accountable executive decision, and layers a corporate-finance lens on top, period after period.
Integrated strategy
Connect marketing and operations decisions into a single strategy, and manage the trade-offs and unintended consequences of moving within one silo.
Cross-functional cause and effect
See how logistics choices shape marketing outcomes and the other way round: warehouse capacity, lead times and stock-outs all show up at the till.
Cash flow and profitability
Optimise free cash flow and profit across the whole value chain, reading the income statement, the balance sheet and the cash position as one connected system.
Brand and channel
Position up to five brands, allocate the marketing budget, segment the market and choose the channel mix: marketing strategy at executive level.
International expansion
Decide which of the five markets to enter, which to defend and which to exit. Each one adds share, but dilutes margin and stretches the supply chain.
Corporate finance
Price working-capital gaps, choose the tenor of the debt, set dividend policy, and apply discounted-cash-flow analysis to a binding investment.
The real lesson is the cascade
Mastering one lever is necessary but not sufficient. A pricing or financing move in one round ripples into the next: into the investment decision, into debt amortisation, into the final scorecard. The objective that runs across every lever is systems thinking under uncertainty.
Five seats, five tensions
Each team is an executive committee. The five roles divide the decisions, but every role carries a built-in tension, and they can only win together.
CEO
Sets the strategic direction, validates the big investment bets and answers for the bottom line.
CFO
Decides when to borrow and on what terms, whether to reinvest or distribute profits, and how much cash to hold.
COO
Decides how the product is made and how much is produced each round, and how to react when demand swings.
Logistics director
Decides which markets the company is in and how the product reaches the customer: regions, warehouses and shipments.
CMO
Decides how demand is captured and at what price: pricing by region, brand presence and reading the competition.
The roles are deliberately described without jargon or dashboard codes, so any executive cohort can step in and play from minute one.
The marketing front: capture demand profitably
The marketing dimension hands the team the full executive toolkit: brands, budget, segmentation, channels, price and sales force, all reacting to competitors and to inflation.
Product development
Start with two existing PremierPrint brands: modify them, retire them, or launch new ones, up to five, positioned on the product attributes.
Budget allocation
Split the quarterly marketing budget across R&D, advertising, sales force and market research. Going over the limit has consequences.
Segmentation
Target five distinct customer segments, each with its own buying behaviour and its own price sensitivity.
Channel strategy
Choose the mix across four distribution channels, each with different brand penetration and a different pull with customers.
Pricing
Set price by region, anticipating competitor reactions and inflation. Too high loses share; too low bleeds margin.
Sales force
Size the sales force and allocate it across territories: the reach that turns brand awareness into sales.
Five attributes that shape brand perception
Quality
Build and print quality: the first thing expert buyers judge.
Speed
How fast it prints: the headline number for buyers who will not wait.
Design
Look and feel: what the high-income segment pays a premium for.
Reliability
Does it just work? The quiet driver of repeat purchase and word of mouth.
Size
Its footprint at home: decisive for buyers in small apartments.
Four distribution channels
Specialty stores, appliance stores, department stores and digital. The channel mix decides which segments you actually reach, and each channel has its own brand penetration and its own pull with customers.
The operations front: make it and move it
The operations dimension runs the full supply chain: sourcing materials, manufacturing across countries, warehousing, shipping and the retail strategy that puts product on the shelf.
Materials
Three starting pieces
Component A
Sub-assembly
Component B
Sub-assembly
Final product
The 3D printer
Procurement
Source materials from suppliers that trade off unit cost, lead time, reliability and quality. The cheapest supplier is often the least reliable.
Manufacturing
Set production levels country by country, because each market has a different manufacturing cost, and size machines, shifts, staff and overtime to capacity.
Warehousing and shipping
Size the warehouses per region and move goods between markets by air, truck, train or ship, each mode with its own cost, speed and reliability.
Retail strategy
Invest in trade marketing to win shelf space across the retailers in the case, each with its own price and its own reach.
Finance monitoring
Track cash inflows and outflows in detail as the goods cross the five markets: the operational side of keeping the company solvent.
Executive summary
A benchmarking dashboard that puts your operations side by side with every rival: the committee's competitive radar.
Transport: price versus service level
| Mode | Carriers | Reliability |
|---|---|---|
| Air | SkyHaul · JetSpeed | 98–100% |
| Truck | RoadLink · PrimeTrucking | 88–92% |
| Train | RailConnect · InterRail | 88–95% |
| Ship | OceanX · BlueWave | 78–89% |
Air is the fastest and the priciest; ship the cheapest and the slowest. Within each mode, the cheaper carrier is less reliable, and a failed shipment is a lost sale.
Suppliers: the cost and reliability trade-off
The suppliers in the case trade off unit cost, lead time, reliability and quality: the bargain options carry real failure risk and reliable supply costs more. An order that never arrives becomes a lost sale.
Four levers that turn the game into a finance seat
A corporate-finance layer sits on top of operations. Each round, teams set four finance levers, and the cost of capital sits underneath all of them.
Short-term loan
A revolving credit line to bridge working-capital gaps. Interest is paid on the outstanding balance and the limit is 50% of receivables plus inventory.
Long-term loan
Issue a new tranche in the round and choose its tenor, from one to three rounds. Cash now; principal and interest amortised later.
Dividend policy
Distribute 0, 25, 50 or 75% of the round's net profit, or retain it to fund growth. A signalling decision with real cash consequences.
Cash buffer target
Set a target cash level. The surplus earns deposit interest; too high a buffer wastes the opportunity cost of idle cash.
The cost of capital: the lever beneath every lever
The weighted average cost of capital discounts the investment decision and frames every borrowing choice. When long-term debt is cheaper than equity, borrowing creates value; idle cash earning less than the cost of capital quietly destroys it. The instructor can tune it to change the difficulty.
| Instrument | Rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term loan | 8.0% | Capped at 50% of receivables plus inventory |
| Long-term loan | 5.0% | Tenor of 1 to 3 rounds |
| Cash deposit | 1.5% | Earned on the surplus above the buffer |
| WACC | 8.5% | Discount rate for the investment decision |
The finance layer is configurable per scenario: it can be switched on in full, with the four levers, the investment case and the balanced scorecard, or switched off for shorter operations-only sessions.
One binding decision: the warehouse expansion
Mid-game, the board tables a real investment. The Eastern distribution centre is running at 85% of capacity and will hit its ceiling next round. Teams have to value the expansion with discounted cash flow and commit: invest, wait or walk away.
Invest now
Commit the investment straight away: the capacity comes on stream in time for the remaining rounds, and the cash flows it generates are discounted at the cost of capital.
Wait one round
Postponing has a price: the expansion costs more and a full productive quarter is lost. Waiting is rarely free.
Do not invest
Keep the status quo: zero cash flows, zero value. It is the benchmark the other two branches are measured against, and sometimes it is the right answer.
The real takeaway: sensitivity to the cost of capital
Same cash flows, different answer. At a low cost of capital, investing is clearly positive; at a high one, it turns negative. The point is not the number: it is that the discount rate decides.
Calibrated for any cohort
The case ships in variants: one deliberately tight, one where investing is clearly the right answer, and one where it clearly is not, so students practise a clean reject. The instructor picks before the round opens.
The decision is taken and locked in the third live round, and its cash flows resolve across the two rounds that follow. The salvage value lands at the close of the game.
How a round resolves
Each round is a 90-day quarter. Teams lock in their marketing and operations decisions; the instructor runs the engine, which processes every company together and publishes the reports.
Demand
Allocates share across the five markets
Production
Runs production across several countries
Shipments
Transit with probabilistic reliability
Finance
Income statement, balance sheet and cash
Next round
Rolls balances over and amortises debt
4 historic rounds + 4 live
The engine pre-runs the first four rounds with seed decisions, giving every team a year of operating history. Teams then play the four live rounds, which are the ones that count.
Deterministic core, real uncertainty
Market allocation, production and finance are reproducible from the decisions, so results are explainable in the debrief. But supplier and transport reliability inject genuine risk: a failed shipment becomes a lost sale.
Share is relative
Each of the five regions is its own market. Share is won on price, brand, channel and reach, but always relative to the rival teams, and it shifts gradually rather than from one quarter to the next.
One balanced scorecard ranks them all
Each round, teams get a full reporting suite, but they are ranked on a single balanced scorecard that blends four dimensions, so nobody can win on profit alone while starving cash or share.
Each dimension is normalised from 0 to 100 relative to the cohort, then weighted into a single number. The weights are configurable per scenario.
Illustrative final scorecard ranking · a 0 to 100 composite, ranked relative to the cohort.
Financial statements
Income statement, balance sheet and a detailed cash ledger for your company.
Market and executive summary
Share, brand perception and awareness by segment, benchmarked against every rival.
Ratios
ROE, the cash-conversion cycle and the financial-health ratios that drive the scorecard.
Round summary
A recap of what just happened in each round, plus the four pre-played historic rounds.
A week, round by round
A typical five-day intensive interleaves the live decision rounds with the teaching moments, building towards the investment decision mid-week and the scorecard reveal at the end.
Kickoff and setup
Teams form, tour the dashboards, review the four pre-played historic rounds and get oriented on the levers and the scorecard. No live round yet: the board is set.
The first live round closes
The first live round resolves. A short debrief, reading the income statement together, and a first look at the investment case that arrives the next day.
The investment decision
The most important class of the week. The brief is handed out, the three branches are worked through in groups, and the binding decision is locked in before the round closes.
Case debrief and first ranking
The investment branches resolve, the discounted cash flows are worked through on the whiteboard, the sensitivity to the cost of capital is stressed, and the scorecard is revealed publicly for the first time.
Final round and debriefing
The last live round, the final scorecard reveal, team presentations, the patterns across teams, and the debrief that turns the experience into transferable learning.
Formats flex: the same eight rounds run as a five-day intensive, as two rounds a week, or as one round a week across a twelve-week semester capstone.
The instructor runs the world
A control panel lets faculty pick the scenario preset, tune the difficulty, run each round and watch every company, while students see only what they should.
Configure the scenario
Pick the preset, set the scorecard weights, the financial rates, the cost of capital and the start year. The finance layer is a single switch.
Run the rounds
Run the engine after each round; decision cards lock while it processes. A round can be reverted or the game reset, and the four historic rounds pre-run on their own.
Dial the difficulty
Lower the cost of capital for cohorts new to discounted cash flow or raise it for an edge, swap the variant of the investment case and adjust the scorecard weights.
Monitor everything
See who has submitted their decisions, read every company's data, and project the ratios dashboard publicly at mid-game to compare the cash-conversion cycle and ROE across teams.
Teams see the cost of capital, the financial rates and the scorecard weights, so they can do the maths and know what they are optimising, but only their own company's data: never a rival's decisions, and they never run the engine.
Where the learning is made
The simulation creates the experience; the debrief turns it into transferable insight. A four-step arc moves teams from what happened to what they will do differently.
What happened?
Observation. The final scorecard is revealed and the facts are laid out: rankings, share moves, cash positions.
Why?
Analysis. Each outcome is traced back to the marketing, operations and finance decisions that caused it.
So what?
Interpretation. The patterns are connected to the frameworks: discounted cash flow, working capital and the cascade between rounds.
Now what?
Application. Each participant names the lever they understood best, and the one that still confuses them.
Questions that open up the room
Defend your investment decision in 90 seconds, and include the discount rate.
If the cost of capital were higher, would you change your choice? What does that tell you?
Look at the team in first place. What would you copy from their strategy, and what would you change?
If you could replay one round, which would it be, and what would you do differently?
The concepts the close nails down
PremierSim at a glance
Archimedes LMS platform · an Eureka Simulations product
Answers to the most common questions
It is the integrated executive simulation of the Premier Print Co. case: each team runs a rival company that manufactures and sells a household 3D printer, taking the marketing decisions and the operations decisions at the same time across five international markets.
Mastsim trains marketing strategy and Premier Print Co. Logistics trains operations and supply chain. PremierSim is the umbrella experience: it holds both dimensions on the same engine and the same bottom line, and layers corporate finance on top with a binding investment decision.
There are eight quarterly rounds: four historic rounds already played and four live ones. It runs as a five-day intensive, as two rounds a week, or as one round a week in a semester-long capstone.
EMBA, executive education and undergraduate management capstones. It is played in teams of 3 to 5 participants, with roughly 6 to 12 companies competing against each other.
The scenario preset, the scorecard weights, the interest rates, the cost of capital and the variant of the investment case. The finance layer is switched on or off per scenario, depending on whether you want a full integrated session or a shorter operations-focused run.
Let us talk about your programme
Write to us about how we can help you achieve your learning objectives.
General inquiries
info@eurekasimulations.comPhone
(+34) 688 953 242Technical support
tech@eurekasimulations.comReady to get started?
Bring PremierSim into your academic programme
Request a demo and we will show you how PremierSim fits into your EMBA, your executive programme or your undergraduate capstone.