What did you find the best “policies” and strategies were?

Describe the strategy you

found to be best.
b. Describe at least 3 principles/concepts/mechanisms of systems dynamics (i.e. from my
slides or the class readings – Thinking in Systems) that you think are at play in this
simulation and how they impacted your performance (you might include diagrams,
charts or data from e-bank to support your discussion)
Principles
I began my first attempt at the eBank simulation by trying to decipher what specific
metrics would change what outcomes for the company. I would change the two metrics, being
the savings rate and target hiring to higher and lower numbers, skip forward 10 months, and see
what the difference was in the summary resource map. I established two main principles using
this method.

1. A staff that is over capacity affects the service quality and reputation of the firm. This in turn
lowers the new accounts that we will acquire, ultimately lowering our operating profits.
2. You can maintain customer growth in two ways. The first is hiring more trainees in time for them
to be promoted to experienced staff so they can handle the increased workload. The second was
by decreasing the eBank savings rate to under competitor’s AVG rate in order to slow growth.

With these two principles in mind, I was able to form my strategy for a full run of the game.

Strategy

In my second attempt, I started by focusing on acquiring enough initial staff for the large onset of
customers that come at the beginning of the game. I kept my Savings rate at a high 5.75% to gain market
share as fast as possible. We did not actually get a positive cash balance until Year 2 month 12. That
month we dropped our interest rate to the much lower 4.75%, which was .05% above the industry
average. At this point, we had a large customer base who were happy with the reputation of the firm
because throughout the first two years of the simulation I focused on building a large enough staff that
was able to meet the customer’s needs. With the interest rate at 4.75 we still had steady growth of
customers, however we could actually make money off of their investments because the interest rate
was now at a competitive level. My goal was to now maintain a good staff capacity and workload balance
in order to keep service quality high. I also fluctuated my interest rate to be slightly higher than the
competitor’s average interest rate. This was so we could continue catching new customers as well as
reducing the number of cancellations we would see. By maintaining this balance, I finished at a cash
balance of $256,000.

I noticed something during my second attempt that made me want to attempt a third
simulation. I saw that the eBank simulation software did not always account for real world behaviors
such as a huge price gouge that would typically cause a business to instantly go under. I started my third
attempt by hiring the maximum number of new employees that I could per month. I was limited by the
Actual Hiring number that flowed into the new trainees. I was trying to get as large of a market share as
possible while attempting to maintain service quality and reputation in order to get as many Net savers
per month as possible. At my peak, in Year 4 month 9 I had 3083 customers. One month prior to my
peak, I dropped the interest rate to 1%, and made my hiring rate -100. This was because I knew the game
would end in 4 months but the simulation has built in delays for customers. By doing this I increased my
eBank cash balance from $130,594 in month 8 to $249,306 in month 9. I ended the game with a cash
balance of $470,988.