AMERiCA LEARNiNG MEDiA

Within a year of the launch of the Simformer Business Simulation (SBS) platform, over 200 companies and universities around the world are exploring its use. It is also now being used in the project with iSpace, a company based in Poland. The project involves university teaching staff experiencing the Simformer business game, “Corporation in Distress”.

Fusing the fields of educational technology, game design, business development and human resources (HR) within complex computer systems, the SBS platform is based on a complex business simulation developed by the international team currently based in Lithuania, under the name of Marilana.

Simformer corporate users include UniCredit Group’s Tiriac Bank, which gets its senior executives and “rising managerial talent” to test their strategic business skills via the SBS. The platform has a number of users in the academic sector around the world as well.

In June this year, in Bucharest, Romania, members of the Tiriac Bank’s senior management teams used an SBS-enabled virtual environment to engage in the business game, “Corporation in Distress”. The game, moderated by a team of Simformer specialists, involved 24 managers making quick, efficient and effective decisions, after being given a mere six hours to bring their fictitious companies back to profitability.

“The game provided a challenging scenario for both the teams and individual players,” said Simformer Key Account Manager, Adelina Nalivaikaite-Karelidze. “The simulation also provided opportunities for testing essential business skills, including decision-making, prioritizing, strategical thinking, teambuilding and leadership – and, thankfully, both teams succeeded in making their firms profitable again by the end of the game.”

After the event, UniCredit’s HR specialists received comprehensive player performance reports so that they could identify both employees’ existing skills and areas for further improvement.

Developed in collaboration with Vilnius University, the multi-dimensional SBS provides a systematic approach to corporate education. Combined with a learning management system (LMS), it enables organizations to amass corporate knowledge, reinforce it via customized game situations, and automatically monitor employee performance.

“Students who use the Simformer platform always report a great deal of additional learning – relating to such things as data analysis, business decisions, levers that make businesses successful and quality management,” said Dr Andrei Fedorov, Simformer’s Education Program Director. “In many ways – some of which we’re only beginning to explore – Simformer represents a major breakthrough in learning technology.”

“SBS is continuing to arouse the interest of course developers, academics in further and higher education as well as those involved with corporate education centers, along with venture capitalists,” said the company’s CEO, Sergey Menshchikov. “Simformer makes possible serious business games, simulations, e-learning courses and training programs for businesses and educational institutions.

“The platform’s features and functions enable practical skill-oriented training in business management disciplines. So course developers, business trainers, and teachers who want to create unique educational products aimed at skills development are turning to Simformer to help them.

“Learning becomes more engaging via gamification,” Sergey added. “Practical orientation, the elements of competitiveness and real world unpredictability that gamification brings, along with objective and automatic assessment, positively impact the effectiveness of educational programs.

“With Simformer companies can significantly reduce training budgets, as well as provide access to content 24/7, regardless of the geographical location of their employees. Moreover, Simformer offers flexible solutions to suit both small companies and large multinational corporations.”

Minvydas Latauskas, Head of Product Development at Simformer, commented, “Importantly, while learning platforms, such as MOOCs, only provide theoretical knowledge, the Simformer platform provides the theory together with the practical skills development that the learners need.”

In the light of this interest from the academic as well as the learning and development worlds, Simformer is now expanding its range of ready-made simulations, based on the SBS. Encompassing group and individual courses, this growing range of simulations covers both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications.