Top Rated Comp XM exam answers and Tips for Guranteed Results
The key reason for learning through a simulation is to test your competency and the skills that you have retained. The Comp XM exam gives you the opportunity to prove that you have gained information and can apply it.
This guide will help you navigate through your COMP XM exam as well as show you pointers, tips, and what you should expect while taking the exam.
What is the COMP XM assignment?
As a CEO who has been running a virtual company that mirrors real competitive factors in a real business setting, you will be required to take a test where you will demonstrate your skills and understanding and what you have absorbed. The only difference here is that the COMP XM exam is done individually and you do not have the backing of a team, unlike the Capstone and Foundation exams. Your decision-making has a direct impact on the company’s standing.
This exam is important because
- Unlike many exams that focus on your ability to answer questions, the Comp XM exam analyses your ability to manage and run a business.
- The Comp XM exam offers you the opportunity to enhance your learning process because you get real-time results as per your personal efforts during the entire assignment duration.
- The Comp XM exam ensures that all the learning goals are achieved by testing your understanding and strategy implementation across the various stages of the learning process.
There are two types of questions that you should expect to be asked; the decision-making and the board query questions.
Board query questions
The board query question is a set of online-based quizzes that test your knowledge using the results of your simulation. The board of directors will ask you a series of all the 5 sets of questions based on your previous rounds. For example, you will be asked to explain the impact of taking additional loans on the company’s financial well-being.
The questions can come up in the form of true or false statements, essays, and multiple-choice questions. All these questions are unique to each participant but they all test on the same content. based on the simulation. It is therefore important for you to revise and go through all your content and pay attention to all the lessons from your class and go through all the revision materials to help you prepare.
After you are done with the board query questions and the panel is satisfied, you will move on to the next segment where you are in charge of decision-making as the CEO of the company. The decisions will touch on the different fields in the company and your results will be recorded in a balanced scorecard.
What areas does the comp XM exam test?
Your performance will be measured using the balanced scorecard which evaluates performance across the following set of areas
- Operations management
- Financial theory and analysis
- Communication skills
- Financial responsibility
- leadership and change management.
- Marketing theory and analysis
- Business unit integration.
Decision-making section.
The decisions made in this sector affect a wide-ranging area such as production, research, and development, marketing as well as administrative costs. You will learn how to make the best decisions in each of these individual sections
Research and development
The more complex the technology the higher the material costs, which are also driven by positioning. The nano and elite segments are usually in the lead at the beginning of the segment as the thrift segment trails behind because of its lower cost.
It is a good idea to keep a modest budget in the research and development area. The most superior products do not guarantee victory therefore keep it moderate in the nano and elite segments and do not go overboard in terms of spending. Also, remember that they will not bring in a lot of sales because of their late release.
The thrift segment on the other hand does not care about new innovations. They are banking on products that have already been tried and tested and whose prices are low so there is no need to spend a lot of money on this segment.
Keep a closer look at what your competitors are doing, especially the topmost competitor.
Make sure that all the products are introduced to the market by round 2 of the game, which is latest August 30th the next year. Adjust size and position to reduce revision date in the case where decisions result in a revision date of more than the round 1 year(October 10th same year). Keep adjusting until you get a revision date less than September 30th of the same year.
Marketing And promotion decisions
Keep the promotion budget for your company high. Promotion builds awareness and creates anticipation for your product. Aim for a higher level of awareness and maintain it there. Remember that for each 1/3 of the awareness you lose in a year, you need to spend to boost it and each product reaches diminishing returns at a certain level, so you need to take note of that.
Aggressive spending here will allow you to reach 100% awareness as soon as possible, at which point you will have to spend at least 1.4 million to maintain it.
Because some teams might be wary about spending on marketing, this will give you a boost to expand into other market segments and will allow you the opportunity to score the highest customer survey points.
When making a sales budget, remember that the budget translates to the amount of time that the sales force will spend selling the product. To make an impact, you need at least two products within the segment to reach 100% accessibility, which will justify spending more than $3,000 on each product to bring additional impact.
Production decisions.
When it comes to production factors, factors such as hiring additional overtime workers or adding shifts will lead to additional labor costs and eat away at the profits.
You should therefore look into increasing the automation levels at your company. An increase in automation has a direct effect on labor costs, which fall by up to 10% at any point of automation. This also boosts your automation rating, which is measured between 1 and 10.
Caution should be taken in regards to automation. For elite and nano segments, it can be hard to revise products quickly when there is fast and excessive automation. On the upside, for the thrift and core market segment, where the prices are low, automation increases the overall net margin.
When making decisions regarding production, keep in mind that you score some points for customer satisfaction. You should therefore make sure that you produce enough units to meet the customer’s demand. The units should be sufficient enough to cover good and bad economic times. This makes sure your customers are satisfied throughout.
When you find that your business is not performing well, for example, you have debts that are affecting your credit score, you can sell some of the plant capacity to offset the loans. To do this effectively you should look at the product that is contributing the least. That is the one that has the least profit margins. Sell that one. However, do not sell out all the capacity. You should retain some in case there is an increase in demand.
Selling capacity will enable you to meet your immediate financial needs while also making sure that there is an opportunity for growth in the future.
The other important reason why you should sell capacity is if there is no additional value that a product is contributing to your company. For example, when you have a product with the most capacity but the least contributing margin, you can sell the capacity. This applies to all the other products in the different segments as well.
There are instances when you might need to increase capacity. For example, when plant utilization exceeds 150%, this decision will depend on the sales increase from the previous rounds. For instance, if the sales increased by 100,000, then it is prudent to order 200,000 in increased capacity so the excess 100,000 can cover the surge in demand.
When you introduce a new product, you will also need capacity for increased production. The capacity will depend on the segment to which you are introducing the new product to. For instance, if you introduce new products in the high-end and performance segments, purchase capacity but do not exceed 350000. The reason for this is that, unlike the low-end market that enjoys a bigger market size, there is a low market size in the high-end segment and therefore no need for a bigger capacity as this might lead to excess inventory which will cost more for storage spaces.
Finance decisions
As the CEO of your company, in the comp XM industry, you have to make good financial decisions to make sure you avoid getting into a financial crisis.
The financial resources available for your company include the following
- Stocks. The stock issues are limited to 20% of your company’s shares.
- Bonds. These are ten-year notes that carry an interest rate of 1.4%, higher than that of the current debt. Bondholders are also willing to loan up to 80% of the depreciated value of the company plants and equipment. Unlike the current debt, there is a brokerage fee of 5% for issuing bonds
- Current debt. These are one-year banknotes, and bankers will loan you up to 75% of the accounts receivable, which is estimated by measuring your inventory found in the income statement. There is no brokerage fee for the current debt.
You should plan your finances well ahead of time to avoid having to take out an emergency loan. Emergency loans carry a penalty of 7.5 % above the current debt interest rate, which is not healthy for your company.
You should ideally leverage days of working capital, which can either be too high or too low. This ranges from 30 to 90. To increase your days of working capital, you need to increase your current assets, which can be done by selling capacity or issuing long-term debt and stock. On the other hand, if you want to reduce your working capital, you need to apply the opposite mechanism, that is issuing short-term debts, retiring stock and bonds, and buying capacity. You can also issue dividends. This increases current liabilities or reduces current assets in other words.
To avoid taking up the emergency loans, issue short-term debt and long-term debt in case you do not have enough retained earnings. You should also not issue stock as it will reduce your market capitalization by lowering your share value.
Keep in mind that companies with better bond ratings have lower interest rates.
When making financial decisions, you should do it with the aim of creating and maintaining balance. The aim is to increase points in the balanced scorecard and not reduce them. For example, when you issue stock, you eventually end up reducing the stock prices. This is one of the many issues you should be aware of before making a decision. Therefore, when making any decision, countercheck the score to see that you are improving.
Human resource decisions
In order to boost your company’s performance, you will be making decisions on the human resources and the policies that will affect the workmanship of the company.
To increase production capacity and productivity, it makes sense to invest in hiring a high-quality employee. This not only reduces the labor cost but also lowers the turnover rate and the overall admin costs. You can be spending up to 5000 to hire this qualified personnel.
When it comes to training, you can boost the productivity index by increasing the training hours up to 80 hours. Highly productive workers will save you money and will lead to better workmanship and fewer wastages. Therefore invest in this area to make sure that the productivity index does not go below 100%.
In as much as training increases efficiency, and may reduce turnover, the training hours increase the needed complement because instead of working, the workers are in a classroom.
There should be a balance when deciding the number of employees to hire. Fewer workers will mean that a lot of work gets pushed to overtime and the second shift and this decreases the efficiency. More employees than are necessary also means that a lot more is spent on additional labor costs.
Comp XM TQM Decisions
The Total Quality Management module allows you to take initiatives that will boost the overall performance of the company.
Depending on the strategy that you will use, the TQM initiatives will result in different outcomes. For example, you might want to reduce material cost and labor costs to increase the margins. These TQM initiatives will be good if you look at the cost as the strategy.
If you are using the differentiation strategy, the TQM will help you R&D cycle time and ensure that the products are newer and better positioned for the different market segments.
If you spend too little on the initiatives, the results will be poor whereas overspending leads to diminishing marginal returns, and after some point and there will be no additional advantage. A good starting point for the amount to invest in these initiatives is 1500 per round, the threshold being 2000.
In order to increase the total effectiveness of your TQM efforts, you should bundle your initiatives so that the complementary efforts bundle together to raise efficiency and effectiveness. Spreading investment among the complementary initiatives also raises the amount that can be used as opposed to an individual initiative that is capped at a specific amount.
Market segment
The sensor market caters to two distinct market segments. There is the high technology and the low technology segment. The low technology is split into thrift segment and core market segment while the high technology is split into nano and elite segment. Cumulatively, they make up the four market segments.
Each market is unique and they expect different needs in terms of price, age, positioning, and MTBF (Mean time before failure).
The thrift segment expects products that have been tried and tested over time. They are motivated by the price and they do not care about the sophistication of technology.
The core segment is motivated by proven products that make use of current technology. The nano segment customers are drawn to high and cutting-edge technology that is smaller in size. Lastly, the elite segment customers seek out higher reliability in their products as well as advanced and cutting-edge technology
For the MTBF (Mean time before failure), customers from all the segments expect reliability. They are all seeking an MTBF rating within the set ranges. The higher the reliability, the higher the demand. Demand lowers when the MTBF rating falls below the range. For example, for every 1000 hours below range, demand drops by 16.7%
Seller’s market
Here, all good products in a particular segment stock out. Remaining customers, therefore, turn to other remaining undesirable products as long as they are within the rough cuts for MTBF price and positioning.
In this market, you should take note of the monthly customer survey score as this is the driver for product sales. Any product with a score of 1 and above competes for sales. You should therefore aim for a higher score because the higher the score the higher the appeal of your product to the customers in any segment.
Your score will fall if your score approaches any of the rough cuts. A lower score usually translates to lower sales unless there are desperate customers with no better alternatives who will accept the marginal products but only as long as they fall within the limits of the rough cuts.
To wrap up, be aware that the Comp XM exam answers are not standard and they keep changing. Therefore in order to perform well, you need to actively engage with the content and pay full attention to your lessons and all the teachings and notes. Do constant revisions and go over the guides thoroughly.
The above tips offer you some insights into the comp XM assignment, what to expect, and some of the comp xm answers to the assignment. This will help you boost your confidence and your chances of scoring highly even if this is your first time attempting the comp XM exam. So keep on practicing using the above examples and scenarios. You can also use past revision materials and content to get familiar with the exams, what is required of you, and some of the approaches you can use to answer the questions. While there are no specific answers, and each question is different, you will be better positioned and prepared to tackle the exams.
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