Company divisions & Real Estate

[Alan Doyle]

Company divisions

Set up divisions within the main company (such as agricultural, mining, sales) that have their own accounts and would enable selling of that division (had enough of sales and want to concentrate on farming? then sell off your sales division).

What about setting up divisions by the choice of the user?

For example, I can start a division and throw whatever "firms" in there that I want? All firms that are unassigned to stay in a group called "Corporate" and the user can name their custom divisions whatever they want?

The reason that I suggest this is because some users may want to organize their divisions by firm type, others may want to sort by product type, and others may want to include the supply chain (like putting farms and supermarkets together for "food").

This was what I intended in my original post but I did not sufficiently expand the explanation.

I envisaged a scenario in which the player ventured into, say, steel production, by building coal & iron ore mines, and a factory and set up a division to encompass the three buildings. At a later date the player decides to move on from steel production and offers that division for sale. The AI would (hopefully!) buy the division to be incorporated within an AI corporation or the division could be used by a new start-up AI corporation as it's first set of buildings (?)

[ajpiper2k]

The organization of divisions is appealing. But, when I have a large company making $2-3 billion / year in profit, I will have 48 Leather farms, 12 factories acting as distribution centers (to ensure a stable leather supply), and 12 factories per product (3 factories for 5 products (wallets, leather jackets, leather bags, etc.) in 4 cities = 60 factories).

Now, having this as a division is good idea for purchasing and selling off entire sections of the company is interesting. But as a product manager for a software company (I do not work for Enlight), I'm comparing this idea to other possible features that they can add to the game.

In my opinion, there are a lot of features that we need in order to manage the day to day operations better. We need to find weaknesses in our supply chain, run our factories more efficiently, and we need to manage our inventory better.

I don't want to kill this idea--because I think it has merit and could add value. But, can anyone think of ways we could use this feature in order to help us maximize our profit potential. To me, this means the day to day operations--not buying and selling of divisions. What could divisions offer above and beyond what the existing product breakdown does not provide. For example, if I have a division, can a report show me all of my factories are underutilized because I'm out of Leather in a city? How is this more effective than going into a factory and seeing my purchasing unit cannot get any leather. I'm going to go to my supply chain and fix the problem. Now, in my model, if I fix a supply shortage, The same fix addresses all my factories, not just one. So, is this really helping me?

I think if we expand the focus of this feature to show benefit from day to day operations, then it may develop into a more useful feature (again, this is only my opinion).

Andy

[JML0328]

If I run a steel production facility that builds a variety of steel products and retails them, this model would help me.

If my production costs increase, I am obviously going to raise price if I want to continue to maintain my profitability.

How, under the current game model do I determine if the entire supply chain is profitable? I would have to go to each of the firms and add up both the before and after profitability and figure out what the impact of the price increases are.

In terms of buying and selling divisions, I am interested in buying entire divisions. I can acquire the infrastructure outright and re-organize to fit my organization.

[ajpiper2k]

If I run a steel production facility that builds a variety of steel products and retails them, this model would help me.

If my production costs increase, I am obviously going to raise price if I want to continue to maintain my profitability.

How, under the current game model do I determine if the entire supply chain is profitable? I would have to go to each of the firms and add up both the before and after profitability and figure out what the impact of the price increases are.

In terms of buying and selling divisions, I am interested in buying entire divisions. I can acquire the infrastructure outright and re-organize to fit my organization.

This is a great example of what I was looking for. Thanks.

This leads me to another question: If I'm looking at the profitablility of the entire division, would we want to be able to break this down into sub-divisions. For example, out of my 100+ sites used for producing and selling Leather, I want to see if New York is more profitable than Bankok. Or I might want to break this into Wallets vs. Leather Brief cases and then break these down by city.

Should this feature allow us to define between 1 and 5 levels of divisions? Do we need more? Do we need less?

[Capitalist]

As a player, however, I do not like the features of hiring managers and managing people in this game. My experience has been that they do not do as good of a job as I can, my business is generally less efficient and I can do a better job myself. While it wouldn't work that way in the real world, I can be more successful in this game without the hired help. For that reason, I would not want to be required to hire managers or highly paid executives for each division.

I agree. Currently bosses are just giving bonuses which are countered by bad job.

But I am strong supporter of division model (or even better, totally free organization model) because I see that it would really add huge amount of playability if player would have choice to build his own organization. You could for example organize every town as separate division and let AI handle "unimportant" towns and focus on the most important yourself. Other example is already mentioned way to collect various units, like leather producing units to one divison. AI could be much more efficient on handling one type of prodution than whole production chain.

Also, if you could give directives to AI bosses it would enable totally new world because then you could really compete not only with products but also with your organization. Directives could be like "optimize profitability", "enhance production" or "lower costs" or even "enlarge yout business by buyouts (with limit of $xxxxxx)" or "try to sell your division (for best price or just sell it out quickly)". There could be good AI bosses for general management, production, quality, branding, retailing, buyouts, cost optimization, cost cutters, sales persons, etc.

Also, if you could add middle management it could enhance organizaton competition even more. You could try to keep all strings on yout hands or make very flat organization with only 1-5 co-bosses OR make even own boss per unit and hierarchically add more bosses to oversee them, like in real company. It could be efficient if you make efficient organization model, but of course, it could lead to disaster if you make really inefficient organization. It then could be also possible to just select wrong people to wrong jobs (like sales person in job where cost cutting is priority, or viceversa).

[David]

We have considered the above suggestions but it seems that there is currently no apparent solution to situations encountered by different players in terms of how to manage a massive corporation more conveniently.

The division idea has its merit but there is a risk of complicating the interfaces, which already has a rather steep learning curve for newbies.

If any of you have suggestions of a more elegant solution, please post your ideas here.


And in response to this topic, the real estate enhancement has been implemented and the details can be viewed at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=200

[jtanker37715]

I understand the concern of complicating the interface which would make it difficult for newbies to understand the game. I know the first time I tried to assign management of certain facilities to my COO, it took me a while to understand what happens when they are managing things.

My thought was that if the CEO is enabled to hire middle management to run divisions, that one could easily just select specific facilities and instead of selecting the COO like we would have done if we didn't want to run the day-to-day activities, we could select one of the middle management people. Then if there was a menu somewhere where we could go in and give directives to individuals we have hired, like "Profit Maximization", "Market Share Maximization", "Production Maximization", etc. Then in each scenario the the Middle Management AI could adjust pricing, training, and marketing levels.

To help with managing divisions, maybe add a "divisions" tab on the menu and have the ability to scroll through all your managers and see their divisions financial/operational results as well as have ability to fire/hire or put the whole division up for sale.

Obviously you can set this to be an optional strategy. I just have a hard time finding enjoyment in going through every leather store and adjusting the pricing everytime my R&D facility finishes a project or every once in a while when the brand has gained enough points to make the product worth more. It would be better to have an AI that manages the pricing for you.

Thanks even for considering David! I'd be happy with the add-on even without this functionality.

[David]

Please read this post, which suggests a potential solution to the problem being discussed on this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=227


The Product Class Expertise actually may provide to a solution to the situations where players found their corporations growing too large at the later stage of the game and micromanagement has become excessive.

With Product Class Expertise and the increased company limit (max 30 AI companies in a single game), instead of keeping growing their own corporations, players may choose to take control of AI companies, making them subsidiaries of their corporations.

Previously, there can only be a maximum of 7 AI companies, so it is impossible to have more than a handful subsidiaries.
Also, the AI's focused markets may overlapped with each other.

With the introduction of Product Class Expertise, the AI companies will always first focus on their product class expertise, then expand to other markets if they have additional resources. Since the game initialize the AI to have unique product class expertise, the subsidiaries you control are likely to be focusing on different markets, thus making sense to keep controlling them as subsidiaries without merging them.

As such, you can keep your main corporation lean, while still have a strong presence on a broad range of markets.

This will potentially reduce micro-mangement and there will be less of a need to have the new company divisions feature as previously suggested.

And extensive testing will be needed to prove whether the above assumption will work or not.

[jtanker37715]

So I have a question on the expertise functionality. When talking about having AI subsidiaries, the human player would still have no control over the operations of the corporation would they? Lets just say I owned a Chemical Mineral Mine and I owned factories and drug stores in three different cities but I bought an AI company that had a significant Pharmaceutical presence in a fourth city. Say I wanted to link all the AI's pharmaceutical's factories to the Chemical Mine so that not only did my chemical mine improve its profitability but I also had more profits from improved raw material quality and more reliable supply of chemical minerals at the AI's factories (what we would call a synergy with real-life mergers). At least from what I can tell, I can't change anything about the AI's operations until I merge it. Are we able to adjust operations of a subsidiary?

[Bigcat]

To simplify the game programming, I suggest to use a big table to give business instruction to COO, CTO, CMO as follow.

Trade / Product / Existing Brand's Rating / Goal Brand's Rating / Existing Tech.'s Rating / Goal Tech's Rating / Existing Overall's Rating / Goal Overall's Rating /
Watch / Elegant Watch__ / 10_________ / 20______________ / 30_________________ / 50______________ / 40__________________ / 60_______________ /
Watch / Sport Watch____ / 20_________ / 30______________ / 30_________________ / 50______________ / 45__________________ / 65_______________ /
Jewelry / Gold Ring_____ / 30_________ / 40______________ / 30_________________ / 50______________ / 50__________________ / 65_______________ /
Jewelry / Silver Necklace / 40_________ / 50______________ / 30_________________ / 50______________ / 55__________________ / 70_______________ /
:

Use this table to set the operation goals of year as CEO always to do, player only need to adjust the value of Goal Brand's Rating, Goal Tech's Rating, & Goal Overall's Rating from 0 -100, it is very helpful to player as the repeating works being done by computer.

If the Company has COO who will automatically adjust the selling price of all products in every cities to achieve Goal Overall's Rating day by day;
if the Company has CTO who will automatically research Technology of product in existing idling research centre to achieve Goal Tech's Rating;
if the Company has CMO who will automatically promote the product to achieve Goal Brand's Rating.

If the product goals are achieved or no input valve on the table, COO, CMO & CTO will not do any undesirable works and just waiting for CEO's New Orders. They will be no longer to damage your business system as before.

It is no difficulty to programming this function, and We can now focus more on the growth of company than the micromanagement that is the game designer want us to do, I think.

In real world, meetings are the main activities of a CEO to handle a company. In meeting, he is just to make decision of development goals and ask for the cost of activities from accountant. Therefore, if the game can has a consultant to calculate the cost of the works to achieve the goals, it will much better.

Finally, if the product goal is achieved, please send the player a message about it.

This is my suggestion about company division management.

However, you may concern about how long to achieve the Brand's & Tech's goals? I think to make programming become possible, The time to achieve the goals should set to 365 days. It is because the shorter time to achieve the goal the cost much higher. For example, the cost of reseach product technology from 30 to 50 in one year is more 2 times than in two year . Therefore, we cannot set all the goals to 100 in the beginning, it will cost too much to make company going into bankruptcy.

If you ask how to set the goals level will be better, it will be the new funny point of game.