Ein Unternehmensplanspiel zum Einüben operativer Planungen und Entscheidungen in Ackerbaubetrieben (English shop)

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This study develops a business simulation game designed to improve students’ ability to manage agricultural enterprises. The simulation game allows the practice of operational planning and decision-making in arable farms, taking into account the interdependencies between the decision situations as well as the prevailing uncertainties, in particular the uncertain price expectations on the factor and product markets and the uncertain yield expectations.

The simulation game FarmPilot consists of two linked sub-models, enterprise management and production management. The enterprise management sub-model produces a balance sheet, a profit and loss account, a financial plan, an inventory plan as well as cost and performance plans, and enables an assessment of the effects of enterprise planning on the goals of the enterprise. The plausibility of the planning, as a prerequisite for the comparability of different plans, is ensured by placing the production management sub-model upstream of the enterprise management. At the core of the production management sub-model are quantitative transformation functions:

Through the development of production functions based on a linear-limitational approach, which in determining yields take into account not only the quantities of factor inputs but also the timing of factor deployment, production planning can be coordinated with procurement and sales planning. The quantitatively defined work procedures, referred to as elementary processes, simplify the preparation of production plans, particularly for inexperienced users. Together with the transport functions, which are used, for example, to calculate set-up and travel times in determining labour and machinery deployment, the elementary processes ensure the comparability of factor input quantities.

By linking production management and enterprise management, the users’ decision areas can be successively extended to include the coordination of partial plans, while at the same time the users’ scope of action can be restricted to such an extent that the plans and results of individual participants remain comparable and the design of a playful learning situation becomes possible. The game extends the range of instruments available for education in such a way that users engage actively with the subject matter and can learn to apply their theoretically acquired knowledge in a realistic situation. This is a basic prerequisite for acquiring practical competence.