Ayekart StratSim: A Resource Allocation Simulation on My Own Case

A case discussion ends in a recommendation that costs nothing. Everyone in the room has an opinion about what the company should do, the opinions are defended well, and then the session ends and no one finds out.

The Ayekart case puts a specific version of that question on the table. Ayekart moves goods for large FMCG brands, efficiently and at scale, and that business is stable and undifferentiating. The margin and the mission both sit with the smaller regional and MSME brands, whose products retailers do not push and consumers do not know. The company has scale but not balance. Rebalancing it means spending money in several places at once, and the whole difficulty is that the places interact.

Argument alone cannot teach that. Interaction has to be felt.

The simulation that sits on the case.

It is April 2025 and the student is Ayekart’s digital marketing and strategy lead, with four crore rupees to allocate this round across seven areas: sourcing, processing, distribution, the digital ecosystem, social impact and digital marketing, with an overview that sets the position. Each area offers fixed options at fixed prices — farmer onboarding camps at sixty lakh, training and quality programmes at eighty, farmer credit support at one crore twenty — plus a variable lever on a slider for anything between nothing and sixty lakh, plus a free-form box for a decision the designer did not anticipate. Strategy bundles give a student who wants one a coherent starting position.

Then the round resolves. The key performance indicators move: quarterly distribution revenue from the large brands, the same from the MSME brands, retailer metrics, brand awareness. What makes it a simulation rather than a calculator is that certain combinations across areas fire as named synergies with their own bonuses — quality compliance taken together with a trust-stamp campaign, a business-to-business push taken together with a consumer campaign, the impact programmes promoted alongside the products they support. A student who spends well in one column and badly in another gets a worse result than one who spends evenly, and the feedback says which pairing they missed.

After the round an analysis panel scores the run across twelve dimensions — strategic coherence, budget efficiency, how much of the available synergy was captured, risk management, long-term vision and the rest — and writes the assessment out in sections.

It is the companion to FMCG-Sim, which is a specification for a six-round competitive simulation for the MBA core. This one is single-firm, built in days rather than specified over months, and unlike FMCG-Sim it has been run with a cohort.

Thirty-two students played it in the MBAEx 2025 cohort, across thirty-four recorded runs.

Each run holds what a case discussion cannot produce: every option selected in every area, the budget spent and the budget carried forward, the indicators before and after, which synergies fired, what feedback the student was shown, and the round score. The record is of what people chose when the choice had a price, rather than what they argued for when it did not.

The application is currently locked behind a platform infrastructure migration and will need that run before the next cohort uses it.

An economic parameter is not a setting. Raising the round budget from two crore to four crore sounded like changing a constant. It meant reworking the scoring weights, the synergy bonuses, the thresholds that decide which feedback a student sees, the impact each option has on the indicators, the prompts that generate the assessment, and every string in the interface that quoted a number. One figure in a simulation is a load-bearing wall.

A thousand-line file will break and will not tell you where. The simulation page grew past a thousand lines and failed three times on unterminated markup, once from a quotation mark inside a quoted string. Every repair was a full rewrite of the file, because the error pointed at the end of the file and the mistake was anywhere above it. The length was the defect.

The mechanic teaches what the discussion only asserts. A seminar can state that marketing an unreliable product wastes the marketing. A student who spends on a consumer campaign, skips quality compliance, and watches the synergy bonus not arrive has learned something that no longer requires my agreement.