The School Business Competition (SBC), has been offered as a free teaching resource in local high schools since 1986. Sprott has been a proud developer and coordinator of the competition, and has valued the opportunity to introduce important business concepts to high school students through interaction and simulation.

Unfortunately, our current resources are such that we will not be running the School Business Competition for the upcoming calendar year. Based upon a comprehensive review of our financial resources and the required demands on human resources, the School has made the difficult decision to put on hold the delivery of SBC. We regret any impact this may have on curriculum planning for teachers in the local area.

We are SBC are in a very difficult situation and would likt to apologise for any confusion, frustration or other issues that may have arisen due to technical and communications difficulties.

Due to an external technical issue after quarter 14, approximately 50% of the teams participating were unable to access their firm and industry analyses as well as their financial statements. Unfortunately the game administrator was not made aware of this problem until Quarter 15 had been processed, meaning that half of the teams were forced to submit blind inputs while the other half of the field had access to this information. At this point, the integrity and fairness of the competition had been compromised. To further complicate the issue, when these ‘blind teams’ attempted to submit inputs for Quarter 16, they were unable to access their input screen rendering further input processing useless as only 50% of the entire competition was able to submit decisions.

We realise that this became an exercise in frustration for many students and teachers – and it has been one for us as well. In attempting to devise an alternative strategy it has become clear to us that no one solution will satisfy all parties involved.

From the perspective of the teams who were leading at the time, the loss of their successful efforts for the first 14 quarters would be unfair should we re-start the competition. From the perspective of teams who were not in the lead, they were not provided with the additional 8 inputs that had the potential to affect the results.

Ultimately we have decided that will ‘call the game’ as of the end of Quarter 14. The firm leading each industry at Quarter 14 will advance to the finals on Friday May 16^th.

Although this was a difficult decision to make, we feel that there is just reasoning behind it. Primarily we feel that ending the competition as it stood at Quarter 14 was the most fair. No unfair advantages or second chances were offered and offering to restart the competition or offering other opportunities to advance to further competitions would require us to offer the same opportunity for all competitions that we run.

Like all of you, we certainly wish that this technical issue could have been avoided and that a full 10-2pm semi-final could have been run, however external factors have made this impossible. We recognize the frustration felt by all - we are right there with you!

Once again we would like to apologise and express that in light of a very complicated and difficult situation we feel that we have made the best decision available to us in order to uphold the integrity and fairness of the Sprott Business Competition.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this decision, please feel free to contact us. Additionally, congratulations to the teams that will be advancing to the final round on Friday. Good luck!

 
Team SBC

Recently there have been lots of questions about units produced. Many of you are wondering why your firm is producing fewer units than you choose in your inputs! This is not a system error- this is a capacity issue!

Each firm has a certain capacity: number of units it is physically capable of producing per quarter. You can find your firm capacity in the Firm Analysis. Capacity is based on many factors, such as employee efficiency (also found in Firm Analysis), and long term investments. A firm can produce (slightly) more than its estimated capacity when it uses employee overtime-but this is costly! Although firms can produce more than the estimated capacity, there is a limit, which occurs when 100% employee overtime is reached.

Firms are unable to produce thousands more units than their estimated capacity, as many teams are trying to do! One of the major problems with trying to produce above capacity is the cost- production is related to employee efficiency and the very expensive overtime costs.

 In order to produce more units- firms must increase the firm’s capacity,through improved employee efficiency and long term investments!

**Think of what investment options you have, and which ones might affect a firm's physical ability to produce more units!!

Good luck!

Team SBC

You MUST add classes AND teams in order for your students to participate in SBC Winter 2008. Once you know the details of your classes, please complete the following steps:

• Login to your SBC teacher account, visit the ‘Game Area’ and select the ‘Class(es)/Team(s)’ page from the menu on the left.
• Click on the ‘Add Class’ link to register a class.
• Enter your class information and click the checkmark box icon to create the class.
• Repeat to add multiple classes.
• Click on the grey ‘+’ box icon beside a class to access the 'Add Team' feature. 
• Enter the number of teams in the text box (remember SBC rules require a maximum of 4 students per team).
• Click the ‘Add Team(s)’ link.
• A list of usernames will appear on this page.
• Make sure to add teams for each class