A capstone where students run the whole company
Teams form the executive committee of Premier Print Co. Their marketing, operations and finance decisions meet in one income statement, one balance sheet and one scorecard.
For professors and programme directors who teach undergraduate business capstones, MBA and EMBA courses or executive programmes.
Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
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One company, every function, real consequences
Students usually learn marketing, operations and finance in separate courses. PremierSim makes them decide all three at once, for the same company and against rival teams: a warehouse decision limits what marketing can sell, and a price cut shows up in the cash.
Integrated by design
Marketing, operations and finance share one engine and one bottom line. No decision survives in isolation: the cross-dependencies are the lesson.
Competitive by nature
Every team runs a rival Premier Print Co. in the same market. Share is won against the other teams, so every result also depends on what the rivals decide.
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
Competitor moves, shifting demand and, with the supply chain on, suppliers and carriers that can fail: 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.
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, four channels
Specialty stores · Appliance stores · Department stores · Digital
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.
What students practise
Three fronts, one company. Every round, teams set the marketing, operations and finance levers, and each lever moves the others.
Capture demand profitably
Every lever reacts to what competitors do and to inflation.
- Product development
- Budget allocation
- Segmentation
- Channel strategy
- Pricing
- Sales force
Make it and move it
Sourcing, production, stock and transport decide whether the demand marketing creates can be served.
- Procurement
- Manufacturing
- Warehousing and shipping
- Retail strategy
The supply chain (procurement, factory, warehouses and shipping) is a layer switched on per course. Without it, the game concentrates on marketing and finance.
Fund it and value it
Four finance levers every round, with the cost of capital underneath them all.
- Short-term loan
- Long-term loan
- Dividend policy
- Cash buffer target
- Cost of capital and a binding investment (NPV)
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.
Roles can be assigned to individual students, or a team can share every screen.
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 variant is chosen for your cohort 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.
From setup to the final scorecard
Four steps, repeated every round. The investment decision lands mid-game and the final scorecard closes it.
Set up
The scenario is fitted to your cohort and the first year is pre-played, so every team starts with an operating history.
Decide
Each round is a 90-day quarter. Teams read their reports and submit their marketing, operations and finance decisions.
Resolve
The round closes on schedule or when the instructor runs it. Every company is processed together and the new reports are published.
Debrief
Results are compared across teams, decision by decision, before the next round opens.
The same rounds run as a five-day intensive, as two rounds a week, or as one round a week across a semester.
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 ranked within the cohort, then weighted into one score. These are the default weights; they can be set per course.
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.
The instructor runs the world
One control panel to run each round and watch every company, while students see only their own.
A scenario fitted to your course
Number of rounds, scorecard weights, interest rates, cost of capital, the investment-case variant and the supply-chain layer are set before the course starts.
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.
Tools for graded courses
An optional per-round decision journal, peer evaluation and board-presentation scoring, so a team game also produces individual evidence.
The debrief view
Every team's results and decisions side by side, with their journal entries, ready to project in class.
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.
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 · a Eureka Simulations product
Answers to the most common questions
It is the integrated business simulation of the Premier Print Co. case: each team runs a rival company that makes and sells a household 3D printer, taking marketing, operations and finance 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.
A year of four quarters is pre-played, so every team inherits a history; then the live rounds begin, usually four or five. It runs as a five-day intensive, as two rounds a week, or as one round a week in a semester-long capstone.
Undergraduate business capstones, MBA and EMBA courses and executive education. Each team runs one company; large cohorts can be split into parallel worlds, each ranked on its own.
The number of rounds, the scorecard weights, the interest rates, the cost of capital, the variant of the investment case and whether the supply-chain layer is on. They are set for your course before it starts.
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