Jan 22, 2010

Media contact: Patty Wellborn
Office: 604-795-2819
patty.wellborn@ufv.ca

Wayne Ortner and Richard Bandelin spent many hours these past few months on their computers while working on strategy for the Glo-Bus Challenge.

Two UFV students win international online business competition

While it was a virtual competition, the victory is very real.

Two University of the Fraser Valley business administration students are one of four first-place teams in the annual worldwide Glo-Bus Invitational simulation competition. Wayne Ortner and Richard Bandelin teamed up to create the virtual Flash-Back Foto for the online challenge.

Each semester, thousands of teams from hundreds of universities and colleges around the world compete in the Glo-Bus challenge — a simulated online competition that focuses on competitive business strategy, and also serves as a key project for UFV’s second-year Business Policy class.

UFV business instructor Kim Milnes explains that each team has to administer a virtual digital camera company in head-to-head competition against other ‘virtual’ companies, making decisions about research and development, component usage, camera performance, product line, production operations, work force compensation, outsourcing, pricing, sales, marketing, and financing.  They must then successfully market their products internationally.

Now they have won the challenge, the pair can hit the books and start getting ready for graduation later this spring.

“Their business is awarded points on how well they meet investor expectations and how they perform against competitors in their industry (each university class is an industry),” she explains. “Just like in the real business world, poor business decisions mean unhappy investors and losing ground to competitors, while good decisions see your stock price soar and your competitors in the rear-view mirror.”

In the end, the team with the best combination of investor and competition scores wins. Based on results from the term-long challenge, where 1,400 student teams compete against their classmates and are ranked against the rest of the world, the top 225 teams are invited to take part in the Glo-Bus Invitational challenge, a special “tournament of champions.” 

Ortner and Bandelin competed and won against the best 45 teams from around the world in the two-week Invitational after achieving a first-place rank amongst some 1,400 teams during the regular or preliminary (in-class) Glo-Bus simulation.

Using a differentiation strategy approach the pair developed unique products for varying customer groupings and used key marketing skills to promote each product specifically to the consumer group. But the key to their success was their ability to analyze their strategy and their competitors’ strategies and find a way to out perform them.

Ortner explains that their game plan involved having different camera models achieve different goals for the company. Their models included an entry-level camera, and a multi-feature model for a niche market.

As all business students will eventually learn, but perhaps not through the value of an online competition, fast-thinking, diversification, and cut-throat techniques will give you the competitive edge. In the Glo-Bus competition, each round is described as a simulated year, and Bandelin attributes their strategy around market share as one of the keys to their success.

“In the second last year (round) we took sole possession of first place and maintained it to the end of the simulation. Our victory was due to our quick turnaround in strategy, and seeking out a competitive edge over the other companies,” he says.

The original Glo-Bus competition began in September and students entered weekly decisions until the end of the simulation in early December. Then the special Glo-Bus Invitational began in mid-December, with an accelerated schedule of daily decisions.  Both Bandelin and Ortner spent many hours analyzing, strategizing, and fretting over the virtual market.

“For each year (decision round) we would work on analyzing and deciding on our strategies anywhere from two to six hours,” says Ortner. “For each decision we would weigh the costs and benefits of our current strategy and changes in the competition. We would then have to decide if we wanted to keep or change our strategy.”

Throughout the competition, they worked with projected results, which would display projected revenues and losses and a net profit. They could also analyze through the projected results how each decision would affect their earnings per share, return on equity, image rating, and credit rating, and what the investor expectations were for these scoring measures.

“These were only projections and relying simply on the projections could cause undesirable results and surprises. It was important that we first decide on our strategy based on the competitive forces in the market, and then make sound business decisions. Once we had done that, it was time to look at our projected results and see how we could improve them,” says Bandelin.

Both Ortner and Bandelin say the competition, while a lot of work was fun and that they took away some important business lessons from the experience. Their instructor Kim Milnes is proud of their achievement.

“In highly competitive tough economic times like these, effectively defining and implementing a company’s strategic direction is vital to its survival,” she says. “In education, so much of the discussion around issues like this is theoretical but to actually see these students putting the concepts into practice and achieving these results makes me confident that both these gentlemen will not just excel academically but will be making sound strategic decisions to help enterprises throughout their business careers.”

Ortner, a Maple Ridge resident, is in his third year of business studies and will graduate with his Business Administration diploma this spring. He plans on completing his Bachelor of Business Administration degree with a marketing option and eventually wants to hold a top-level marketing position for a large organization. Bandelin, an Abbotsford resident, is in his third year of the BBA program. He has focused his studies on marketing and business strategy and hopes to one day become the CEO of a large and successful company.

Milnes says there is no doubt in her mind that either will achieve their business goals.
“I expect to see Wayne and Richard’s names in the financial section of many of Canada’s newspapers in the near future, as leaders of their own companies or perhaps helping one of Canada’s enterprises take on the rest of the corporate world.”

UFV offers a diploma and bachelor degree in business administration along with specialized degrees in aviation, trades, and agriculture. UFV also offers a Canadian Bachelor of Business Administration program in Chandigarh, India, in collaboration with Sanatan Dharma College.
To find our more about UFV’s many Business Administration options, visit www.ufv.ca/busadmin .

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