Beefeater Simulator

Beefeater Grill

Beefeater is a chain of over 130 pub restaurants in the United Kingdom, owned by Whitbread. The chain's name references both the English figure of the beefeater, as well as its menu's meat (particularly beef) offering. The chain is positioned slightly upmarket of Whitbread's Brewers Fayre chain.

http://www.beefeater.co.uk/

 

Beefeater Simulator 

In this PC simulation, Beefeater confronts teams with the challenges involved in growing a multiple consumer retailing business over as much as 10 years. At first, there is considerable undeveloped opportunity, but as restaurant numbers grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to drive further growth. Teams will gain valuable insight into important issues common to other business situations, such as:

• building and maintaining a strong reputation with customers, based on high quality product and service
• driving growth through expansion in a large but limited market, when profitable growth becomes increasingly hard to find

 

 

The software gives faculty a base on which to develop the use of strategy and its effects on business in a realistic virtual environment whilst providing the students a platform on which to develop their understanding of strategy through practice and the use of varying scenario's.  

The simulation is a very good tool to create awareness and understanding of the different types of causality that occur in systems and give participants some sense of how to effectively influence those. Although it is common sense that there is no such thing as unlimited exponential growth in practice and that decisions have impact on different parts of the system in different periods in time, it is still difficult for most people to assess how they contribute to their own 'disaster'. Starting to notice the patterns, having a vocabulary to describe them and talk about them (feedback loops, delays, leverage) and having the visual aids of the graphs and loops really helps making this systems thinking practical and applicable.