Although only selling a limited number of products, participants need to decide how each of these contribute to the business's profitability, growth and cash flow. With decisions covering resourcing, participants must forecast sales and plan their capacity. This must take into account the uncertainties of the impact of marketing decisions, competitive actions and the dynamics of the market-place. QUAD QUAD was designed to replicate a company manufacturing a range of products that are manufactured by two production centres. Where one production centre can manufacture all the products and the other can only manufacture the simplest product and contribute to the manufacture of the middle product.
Sales are repeat orders from existing customers and orders from new customers.
Customers are influenced by price, promotion, quality, the ability to deliver when required and long term market demand trends. Decisions cover prices and promotion for each product, capacity and quality improvement for each production centre and long term loans. For each product they decide price, promotion and production. Overall they decide capacity, long term loans and the research staff development plus a series of decisions affecting research and development. The research and development decisions involve deciding how much effort to put into five areas - performance, quality, materials, process development and basic research.