Building financial understanding

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.