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Building financial understanding

HELPING LEADERS LEAD

Real-world success from the perspective of our customers ...

Building financial understanding through an MBA-in-a-day simulation

Manufacturers Resource Center aligns its leaders and prepares them to make a financial impact with help from Advantage Performance and the Interplay simulation.

Advantage Performance was fantastic to work with because they helped us talk not only about strategic financial management but also about how everything we’re learning works together to impact the bottom line.”

Karen Buck, Manager of Workforce Initiatives,
Manufacturers Resource Center

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SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

The quest for a challenging and relevant business acumen program

At Manufacturers Resource Center (MRC), we are committed to helping manufacturers grow and be competitive. To that end, we created our highly successful Manufacturing Leadership Institute (MLI) certificate program in conjunction with Lehigh University. This annual program, which consists of 11 days of workshops and outside projects delivered over a five-month period, provides training to enhance the skills of current and up-and-coming leaders including CEOs, presidents, GMs, VPs, and sons and daughters who are preparing to take over the family business.

Through our work with small to mid-sized manufacturers, we have found that many leaders and successors are not prepared to read financial reports and don’t understand how the data affects the whole company. To address this gap, we had been using a well-known financial acumen simulation for the final training day of the program, but it was too basic for our audience.

We put the word out that we were looking for a more challenging and relevant solution that would help us pull together everything the leaders had learned and give them practice making strategic decisions related to an organization’s numbers. Advantage Performance responded with the perfect solution – the Interplay simulation.

Developed by Advantage Performance’s strategic partner, 10,000 Feet, Interplay is an interactive simulation that is both challenging and fun. Working in teams, participants create a mission and goals for their fictional company and then compete against other teams to produce the greatest financial impact over four periods of operation.

More about Interplay

Interplay has been called a “mini MBA-in-a-day” for good reason. It builds a broad understanding of the critical factors that influence success or failure in any organization. Originally created for both Apple and Microsoft, Interplay has subsequently been used by many other leading organizations.

The simulation was applicable and realistic. It reinforced the concepts we need to be aware of and showed us the difference that a good executive leadership team can have versus an average one”

– Participant,
Manufacturers Resource Center

Manufacturers Resource Center (MRC) is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to creating jobs and economic opportunity in eastern Pennsylvania. For more than 30 years, MRC has helped small and mid-sized manufacturers become more competitive, adopt lean and agile processes, strategically grow their companies, and invest more effectively in their existing human capital.

Practice Area: Helping Leaders Lead

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