WEEK 9

Business metrics used in Pharmasim and business

In evaluating how my team measures itself, the first easy step is to look at the stock price. The stock price is a very easy indicator for us to show whether we did better or worse than the previous period. It is however not a true indicator of the company’s economic health as many factors go into stock price including speculation and growth. Sometimes these factors are not indicative of the company’s current status and therefore other factors are used to evaluate the company. In most real companies, I would like to think stock price to be somewhat relevant, however my feeling is that growth is much more important. Many company CEO’s often times like to see constant growth going forward. In preparing financial statements at my previous job, management would often look to see how they were doing compared to last year.  If they are doing better than last year in terms of sales or net income, in their eyes, there is growth and they evaluate the company in that manner. Looking at Pharmasim, I like to think I do the same. Upon looking at the stock price, I next look to the change in both sales and net income. If there is a positive change, then I used that growth as a good metric of the company’s health. In recent periods, I have been able to analyze growth a little differently as I began to look at industry growth. I recently noticed that overall the Pharmasim industry has been doing very well. For example, overall industry sales increased by approximately 90% in cold market based on the manufacturer sales report. Of course some of this increase has been based on inflation and price increases, but some has to do with overall market growth. When I compared the increase in manufacturer sales for Allstar, I saw an increase of about 75%. So although sales increase dramatically over the periods for Allstar, so did industry sales. In this case, the idea of looking at growth from the previous year is good, however I found it important to also look at the benchmark. In this case, you have to compare the company’s growth to that of industry standards.

 Class Experiences

Looking at a few of my fellow student’s blogs, I saw that David’s group had made a similar tough decision to my group. I could relate to his group’s introduction of a new product as a tough decision as it was also hard for my group to enter a market. It may have felt risky but after performing our assessment, the market was attractive. Justin’s blog discussed college football’s metric of evaluating their status. I think in his setting, it is a relatively easy metric to use. A lot of the metrics are based on hard numbers which the coach (CEO) can use in evaluating his/her team. There is however some interesting judgement as sometimes the metrics might not look good, but the team may still win. This may be comparable to a company that has low sales but still has net income on the bottom line.

Life as Pharmasim CEO

Managing the company in Pharmasim has been very interesting, especially making the adjustments from year to year. I think that is the biggest that our team has been able to do as it is important to learn from your mistakes. I have also found it important to understand the industry and the competitors and found the situational analysis very helpful in making those adjustments. Managing the company with my team has also helped in creating new ideas. I think each person brings new ideas to the table which I sometimes do not think of. I have really enjoyed sharing ideas and thoughts with fellow teammates as we both might have a different sense of our product and our company.