In the News

This Wall St. Journal story features a BTS simulation run for client NetApp earlier this year. Participants worked to meet annual sales-growth target of 35% while competing against other teams for market share and profitability. The simulation is a leadership development tool for the second tier of 300 managers, building on BTS’ simulation communicating NetApp’s corporate strategy to top 100 leaders last year.

The key publication for financial managers in the oil and gas industry features an article on BG Group's use of BTS simulations to train their managers worldwide.The Business Discovery program is a four-day workshop designed to improve employees’ abilities to make business decisions by increasing their understanding of the oil and gas value chain and its interrelationships.

BTS client Kimberly-Clark and BTS are featured in a story describing an award-winning business simulation at the annual leadership meeting of the consumer-products company.

The article discusses how the simulation drove home the importance of TSR, total shareholder return, to executives. "They were totally immersed in running a company. Immersed in a competition. It felt like Kimberly-Clark," says (Lesley) Hoare. "They could really experience the levers that move TSR." They were so engrossed, she said, that the office that Kimberly-Clark had set up to allow attendees to answer their e-mails — usually a hot destination — was practically deserted.

Training Magazine?s Game Plans (October 2007) analyzes the relationship between technology, gaming and training, and notes that a simulation has a resemblance to reality whereas a game can be entirely fictional. ?We don't call it (our training) games," admits Jonas ?erman, president and CEO of vendor BTS USA. "Top executives don't have time for games."

Training Magazine quotes Henrik Ekelund in an article titled Sims (October 2007) advising how to select a simulation for business training. "Find out what the business outcome is. How will you run a better business after doing the simulation?" says Ekelund. (Ask them) “Is your company a simulation-centric company or a business results-oriented company that does great simulations?”

The Case Study Cingular: Getting Together (October 2007) in Training Magazine tells the story of the BTS –Cingular simulation ideation and launch for approximately 6,000 senior managers during the Cingular AT&T Wireless merger and quotes Dave Ackley. The goal was to go from being the biggest to being the best and leading in every metric that mattered, said Ackley.

Training Magazine’s October story Solid (October 2007) quotes BTS USA’s Dave Ackley and Jonas Akerman about the impact of the gaming culture on the future of training. Ackley expects more requests for online simulations, not just facilitator-led ones. "However, there has to be a realistic interactive approach. Going forward, we'll begin to see more targeted use for specific job roles that drill down to help managers do their jobs better with very specific skills.” Akerman adds, "You can easily get lost in the technology."

The Replacements: CFOs Paying More Attention to New Hires (May 2007) in CFO Magazine quotes Jonas Akerman in a story about accelerating “onboarding” of new financial hires through immersive training. The training should demonstrate how their actions and performance affect the company as a whole, notes Akerman. "Once they understand how they fit in, they align better with the company's goals."

Chief Learning Officer (7 March 2007) quoted Rommin Adl in the story No More Dry Financial Learning, which explored the use of simulation technology to teach financial concepts. Adl notes that the traditional approach taken by companies is to hire a professor or consultant who leverages PowerPoint with some exercises and examples, which is ?not be as effective as it could be. Computer-based simulation technology brings financial concepts to life and makes it much more engaging.??

Most prestigious business magazine in Spain does a report ( April 2007) on the use of simulations in companies and interviews BTS clients as well as BTS Iberia CEO, Dr. Philios Andreou, who describes the evolution of training methodologies and the use of simulations in the Spanish market.

Purposeful Playing (HR Executive Magazine, October 8, 2006), quotes Jonas Akerman in an article on the success of simulations in business skills training. What's different with simulations versus other learning, and the reason they're growing in popularity, is that they're discovery-based and action-oriented," says Akerman. "You don't even know you're learning until afterwards."

ROI in  Change Management - The article "ROI in  Change  Management," written by Dr. Philios Andreou, CEO of BTS Iberia, published in Spanish leadership magazine Equipos & Talento ( 2006), starts by posing a question: "If you were the president of a football club that is not doing well in the league and loses games, would the answer be - let us train less to cut down expenses?" Dr. Andreou discusses how this type of reaction is very typical when it comes to training budgets, but the real problem is that direct links are not being made from the training activity to the measurable business results.

In Training Magazines in-depth profile on business simulations for training, Adl is quoted commenting on the growth of the simulations industry, and BTS in particular, BTS USA in Stamford, Conn., has been growing at a steady clip of 20 percent per year -- despite the bursting of the tech bubble earlier in the decade. This year, says Adl, our growth rate in the U.S. will be in excess of that. The story also interviews BTS client Humana about their the effect BTS simulation had on the implementation of their corporate strategy.

Rommin Adl is quoted in a story highlighting companies who are turning to business simulations to promulgate corporate change. "When it comes to adult education, people tend not to respond to being told what to do they push back," said Adl. "But," he said, "If they try it, work with it, they feel like they came up with it themselves."

Managed Healthcare Executive Magazine publishes a case study, written by Adl, on the use of a BTS business training simulation at Humana. The idea was to immerse participants in a competition to deliver shareholder value by introducing new products and initiatives reflecting the companys new world healthcare approach (Bonnie) Hathcock (senior vice president and chief human resources officer for Humana) believes that the simulation reached top executives in such a compelling way that they now think in the new strategy, as if they learned a new language.

Businessweek featured BTS client Texas Instruments (TI) in a story about the rise of the chip maker, including a story about a BTS business simulation used to drive corporate strategy. Says the author, And he (Chief Executive Rich Templeton) sent 2,000 employees through a two-day boot camp designed to help them better understand customer gripes. Employees played the role of phonemakers, agreed to certain launch dates, and then were told that TI couldn't have the chips ready on time. "We wanted them to really feel the customers' pain," says Jeff McCreary, TI's head of sales. The effort paid off: As the industry rebounded, TI gained market share for two straight years. Even as its biggest customer, Nokia Corp., has seen its share slide, TI has picked up business from ground-gainers such as LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.

CRM Magazine quoted BTS SVP Dan Parisi in a story about a BTS business simulation implementation at Texas Instruments (TI). "The simulation itself," say Dan Parisi, Senior Vice President of BTS USA, "is a dynamic and realistic replica of a TI customer, with all of a typical customer's technical challenges and resource scarcity."

Learning Circuits quotes Dan Parisi in a story about how Texas Instruments inspired its people to renew focus on the customer after years of focus fed by the technology boom. The story describes how BTS developed a customer loyalty course for TIs top 300 executives, which was so successful that it expanded to an additional 2,000 TI managers, and earned BTS a coveted Supplier Excellence Award from a grateful TI. Parisi is quoted as saying, in postscript, "In 2001, TI had some dissatisfied customers. But at the end of 2003, it was receiving supplier excellence awards from the very same customers. Within 24 months, TI turned the entire company in a much more customer centric direction."

Both Rommin Adl, EVP of BTS USA and Dan Parisi, SVP of BTS USA, are quoted in the Stamford Advocate in an in-depth article on BTS work with clients like TI. States Adl, The return on investment (in BTS simulations) is 10 to 12 times the cost. Participants walk away from sessions with an action plan.

Dan Parisi is quoted in this overview of the growth of business simulations and their implementation at major organizations. Commenting on a BTS simulation designed for client Texas Instruments, Parisi says, "You go through the simulation, you do customer videos, you come back together and look at some objective data on the dollarized impact, and it's a really comprehensive way to get them to think emotionally and then logically about customer loyalty and why they need to change." In the final paragraph of the article, Parisi notes, "If you have scarce people, scarce budgets, and you want to invest in people development, you're not going to go through lectures, you're going to put them in simulations. You create an experience that becomes part of the culture of the company."