elero GmbH is a leading global brand in the field of drives and controls for intelligent and sustainable building automation and industrial applications. In order to meet the company’s own quality standards and the needs of its customers, elero places particular value to the the employees’ development. Following the motto “GROW – networking and growing for a successful future”, 15 elero talents met in October 2020 for the 2nd GROW event in Ulm to learn with and from each other with the help of a TOPSIM – Business Simulation.
Goals of the seminar
The goal of the GROW event was to give participants an insight into the topic of holistic business management. The young executives should develop an understanding of the link between corporate processes and the complexity of management tasks and apply this directly to the environment at elero. For the GROW event, TOPSIM – Manufacturing Management was selected due to the similarity between the decision-making processes in this simulation and those at elero.
Seminar design
An online kick-off was held in advance to prepare participants for the content and technical aspects of the simulation. The seminar then took place as a 2-day attendance event in Ulm. In a business simulation, the interactions within the group as well as across groups are crucial to the learning success. The TOPSIM – safety concept for classroom seminars ensured a safe learning environment despite the COVID-19 situation.
For the seminar, 15 participants were divided into four teams and played four periods of TOPSIM – Manufacturing Management. This simulation was ideally suited for the elero due to its main goals, the general subject and also the scale of the figures. This simplified the transfer of what had been learned back to the company and thus increased the learning success.
In each period, participants had to adapt their decisions to new framework conditions and determine the production quantity, the product price and the number of employees. They were supported by the TOPSIM – Cloud, which provided them with important key figures. Due to the large number of decisions in different areas such as human resources, production, marketing, accounting, sales and purchasing, participants got a better understanding of the complexity of management tasks and the interconnectedness of business processes. The young potentials were from different areas in the company and therefore everyone was able to contribute their specialist knowledge. After each period, a debriefing for all teams took place.
Learning effects
The learning effect of the business simulation was also supported by some additional tasks. Participants had to define their strategy and present it in the shareholder’ meeting at the end of the fourth period. During the seminar, the elero talents were supported by the HR manager Michael Hontz and the managing director Enzo Viola. They created a link from the simulated environment to the elero world through additional inputs, thus underlining the importance of the topic.
We would like to thank elero for the successful cooperation and are looking forward to further projects!
