Instructor Manual · StratyaLab

1 Key concepts

Before you start, it helps to be clear on five terms used throughout the platform:

Term	What it is
Organization	The institution (university, school) you work under. It groups instructors and licenses.
Instructor	Someone who creates and manages labs. Can be an Institutional admin (also manages the other instructors) or a regular instructor.
Business Lab	A complete simulation: product, economic parameters, periods and participating companies.
Company / team	Each group of students that makes decisions within a lab. Uses one license.
License	A slot for one active company. The organization has a contracted total; each company in an active lab uses one.

Access: instructors sign in at /profesor and student teams at /login. Everyone receives their credentials by email when created.

2 Create and manage instructors

Only instructors flagged as Institutional admin see the My team section and can create or edit other instructors.

Add an instructor

1
In the navbar click My team.
2
Click Add Instructor and fill in: full name, email address and initial password (at least 6 characters).
3
Check the Admin box only if you want that person to be able to manage instructors too.
4
Click Add. The system emails the credentials to the instructor automatically.

If the email cannot be sent, the platform lets you know so you can share the credentials manually. The person can change their password later from their profile menu → Change password.

Edit, deactivate or delete

In the instructor list, next to each name you have:

Action	Effect
Edit	Change name, email, Admin role or set a new password (leave the field empty to keep it).
Deactivate	Suspends access without deleting the instructor or their labs. Reversible.
Delete	Removes the instructor permanently. You cannot delete yourself.

3 Create a Business Lab

From the Dashboard, click + New Business Lab. You need at least one available license. The form has 11 sections; the defaults already make up a playable lab, so you can adjust only what interests you.

#	Section	What you define
1	Product template	Choose a pre-loaded industry (with its 4 attributes) or Custom to define your own 4 attributes (their weights must add up to 100%).
2	Complexity level	From N1 (basic) to N5 (elite). The higher the level, the more decisions teams handle. The maximum depends on your license.
3	General information	Lab name, product/service type and optional description.
4	Closing dates	Number of periods (3–30) and the closing date/time of each. Includes optional practice periods (0–3) that do not count.
5	Companies	How to load the teams: Automatic, Spreadsheet or Manual (see below).
6	News / shocks	Per-period events that alter the market. Optional; you can generate them randomly.
7	Initial state	Cash, machinery, employees, brand value and initial capital structure (equity / debt ratio).
8	Costs	Variable and warehouse cost per unit, interest rate and depreciation.
9	Market	Base demand, reference price, price elasticity and random factor.
10	Demand dynamics	Market growth per period and growth from quality.
11	Attractiveness	Exponents α (marketing), β (quality) and γ (price) of the attractiveness formula.

Test Mode: the switch at the end creates all companies with the password 123. Useful to rehearse the lab yourself; do not use it in a real course.

No-submission penalty: in the periods section of the form you choose the level (None · Mild · Strong, Mild by default) applied to companies that do not submit on time. It is set here, when creating the lab — details in section 4d.

When you click Create Lab and Generate Companies, the lab is born in Draft state and each team's credentials are shown.

3b · Three ways to load companies

Mode	When to use it
Automatic	You only enter the number of companies (2–20, depending on licenses). The platform generates names and credentials.
Spreadsheet	You paste a public URL from Google Sheets or Excel online with Company, Email and per-area manager columns. The area names are created as protected managers.
Manual	You add each company by hand: name, email and, optionally, its per-area managers.

Each team should have an email: that is where it receives its credentials and each period's results.

3c · Team credentials

After creating the lab, a window appears with each company's username and password, plus the access URL. The password is shown only once, so copy it or rely on the email delivery.

If a team loses its password, you can generate a new one from lab management (tab Companies → New access password).

Services labs

When creating a lab you choose the type of business: physical goods or services. It cannot be changed later, because it alters the central economic rule.

	Physical goods	Services
What is sold	manufactured products	service capacity
What goes unsold	stays in inventory	is lost
Metric it teaches	inventory turnover	utilisation

The core lesson. A consultant without a project costs the same as a busy one: the salary is already paid. The cost ends up with no revenue to cover it, which is why a drop in utilisation takes profit down with it.

13 services available

Each one states which resource limits the business:

Limited by…	Services
The team	consulting, software, marketing agency, law firm, call centre
The premises	hotel, gym, coworking space
The scarcer of the two	clinic, restaurant, salon, repair shop, training academy

The bottleneck. A clinic with 10 consulting rooms and 3 doctors serves like 3. Buying an eleventh room treats no additional patient: it forces the team to find its scarce resource before investing.

What changes for your students

Visible break-even: the panel states what % of capacity must be sold just to avoid losing money.
The team is the product: in consulting, clinics and salons a senior team delivers nearly twice as much and sustains a higher rate — but costs more.
Marketing is not universal: in consulting, brand dominates; in restaurants and hotels, reviews and digital do.
Only the restaurant pays for over-offering: surplus food is lost.
Channels speak their own language: nine of the thirteen services sell through intermediaries, and each names them after its own sector — a hotel allocates between online travel agencies and tour operators where a clinic does so between insurers and corporate agreements. The economic mechanism is the same as wholesalers and retailers in goods; only the name changes. The other four (consulting, hair salon, software, legal) always sell direct and never see the Distribution tab.
A services lab receives 35 of the 40 news events: those about inventory and physical distribution are hidden.

Business case: material for strategic analysis

Each of the 13 services has its own ~3-page case in all four languages, available to the team at /company/caso and to you in read-only mode from each company's detail view.

It is written so the student can build from it an internal/external matrix, an environmental analysis, a sector analysis, a portfolio analysis or an activity map. The inputs are seeded deliberately: starting capabilities and gaps, one fact per environmental dimension, rivals and barriers and substitutes and supplier and buyer power, and the numeric growth of all four segments plus the typical entrant's share — without two quantified axes no portfolio analysis is possible.

The case does NOT name the analysis. It never says "PESTEL", "SWOT", "five forces" or "BCG" in any language, and the section titles are neutral ("What surrounds the business", "Who it competes against"). This is deliberate: recognising that one paragraph is raw material for an environmental analysis and another for a portfolio one is part of what you are assessing. If you want them to apply a specific framework, you have to ask for it in the assignment.

The case gives facts, never conclusions, and closes with five open questions with no answers — usable as an assignment prompt as they stand. Below the text there is a table with the lab's real parameters (reference price, what limits capacity, variable cost, weight of each channel, return per campaign type), so the analysis is done against the figures the engine actually uses.

Not available yet: a subscription model with retention and churn, and explicit referrals.

4 Manage the lab

From the Dashboard click Manage → on any lab. A lab goes through three states:

Draft→ Active→ Finished

Activate

While in Draft you can Delete the lab or click Activate Business Lab. Activating it opens Period 1 and teams can start making decisions.

If you set up practice periods, teams train first (without ranking). When they finish, states reset and the real lab begins; you can launch it manually with Start real lab now.

In the reports, practice and competition are numbered separately: the first real period is “Period 1” even if you played three practice rounds first. When the real lab starts, the practice data is cleared along with the states; those periods still appear in the list, flagged and empty. It does not mean the teams failed to submit decisions.

Management tabs

Tab	What it is for
Companies	View teams, edit data and regenerate each one's access password.
Decisions	Review the decisions each company submitted per period.
Periods	Reschedule the closing date or close a period manually.
Results	Financial and operational results computed per period.
Ranking	Ranking of the companies by performance.
Activity	Log of team accesses and actions.
Plans	Teams' strategic plans (generic strategy, SMART, BSC).
Configuration	Enable/disable modules visible to the companies.

In Plans you see, per team, its generic strategy, BSC objectives by perspective and the consolidated Scorecard (read-only). The team manages its plan from its own "Plan" tab: there it has a step guide (Strategy → Objectives and KPIs → Map → Monitor) and, in "Tracking", a direct link from each driver indicator to the decision field that moves it — useful if you need to explain to a team why its indicator is not advancing.

Each team also has an Analysis tab with 5 free-text accordions (PESTEL, Porter's 5 Forces, Value Chain, SWOT, CAME) with autosave — pure diagnosis, not graded. Porter's generic strategy, the Ansoff Matrix and the growth path are now declared per product if the team has more than one enabled. A BCG Matrix is computed automatically from real results (available from the 2nd closed period) and classifies each product/segment as Star, Cash Cow, Question Mark or Dog. The coherence alerts compare what was declared against the decisions taken — they are informative suggestions, they never block saving. There is no new switch: everything lives inside the existing Strategic plan module, and your view in "Plans" remains read-only.

4b · Closing periods

Each period has a closing date/time. There are two ways to close it:

Automatic: when the closing date arrives, the system processes the decisions, computes results and opens the next period without you doing anything.
Manual: in the Periods tab, use Reschedule to move the date, or Close now to process immediately.

Close now processes the period with whatever decisions exist at that moment. Companies that did not submit are processed with default values (no management) — they no longer inherit their previous decisions — and receive the configured no-submission penalty (see 4d).

4c · Visible modules (Configuration)

In the Configuration tab you enable or disable what each team sees:

Module	What it shows
Strategic plan	Plan tab + Balanced Scorecard for the teams.
Economic model	Link to the theoretical framework and the formulas in the student panel.
Docs / templates	Downloadable Word templates.

These switches are saved instantly and persist even if the server restarts. Change them at any point in the game.

4d · No-submission penalty

You choose the level when you create the lab. A company that does not submit on time is processed with default values and receives a penalty that escalates if it misses in consecutive periods (the streak resets when it submits again):

Level	1st miss	2nd in a row	3rd+ in a row
None	no penalty	no penalty	no penalty
Mild (default)	−5% cash · demand ×0.70	−10% · ×0.60	−15% · ×0.50
Strong	−15% cash · demand ×0.50	−25% · ×0.35	−35% · ×0.20

Cash fine: % of the period's cash, deducted from the result and recorded in the report.
Demand cut: lowers attractiveness that period; the lost demand is split among the rivals.
With None there is no economic penalty, but the streak still advances so you can see it.

In the Companies/Decisions tab, a red N not submitted badge marks each team's streak of consecutive periods without submitting.

Finer tracking

Where	What you see now
Decisions	Price and units per product (not only Product 1). Multi-product teams are broken down `P1 / P2 / P3`.
Activity	Each submitted decision carries a period badge, and a period × company matrix shows the hours/minutes each team was connected in each period.

Industry case

In any company's Decisions view, the Case button opens the same case study the team sees (sector history, PESTEL, market and segments, competition and industry forces, operations and value chain, strategic challenges) in read-only mode — useful to prepare your feedback or a class discussion before reviewing their decisions.

If the lab uses a custom industry, the page only shows a notice and the market-parameters table — the narrative case does not exist for custom industries, so the context (history, PESTEL, competition) must be provided by the instructor.

Export to Excel

In any active or finished lab, the Download Excel button exports decisions, results and rankings of all periods for analysis or grading.

5 Grades and analytics

Final course grade (configurable)

Besides the Team Grade and the Manager Grade, the Grades tab adds a third grade that combines:

Component	Default weight	How it is computed
Results	60%	Reuses the already-computed Team Grade.
Participation	20%	70% × % of periods with a submission + 30% × (100 − 25 × max no-submission streak).
Quiz	20%	Correct answers / closed periods × 100. Not answering counts as 0 that period.

The weights are configurable in Configuration (must add up to 100). They appear in Grades and are exported in the Excel (columns Results / Participation / Quiz / Final grade).

Knowledge quiz

Each team sees one multiple-choice question per period (marketing, HR, production or finance), answerable only once, with immediate feedback and explanation. It is educational: it does not affect the economic engine, only the quiz grade above.

Quality benchmarking and ESG Ranking

In labs with the industry system (Level 5+), the Results tab adds:

Quality benchmarking: market average and anonymous leader of each attribute and of the total score, per product and period.
ESG Ranking: cumulative sustainable investment per company, with a 0-100 score relative to the leader (includes all companies even if their cumulative is 0).

Engagement analytics

The Activity tab adds three signals about the open period, plus quiz statistics:

Signal	What it flags
Pending	Companies that have not yet submitted decisions in the open period.
At risk	Companies with a streak of ≥ 2 consecutive periods without submitting.
Hours drop	Companies whose connected time fell to half or less vs. the previous period.
Period quiz	How many companies answered and the group's % of correct answers.

These signals are recomputed on each load of the tab — no configuration needed.

6 Frequently asked questions

How many companies can I create?

Between 2 and 20 per lab, limited by your organization's available licenses. Each active company uses one license; they are freed when a lab finishes.

Are credentials sent by email?

Yes. Both new instructors and teams are sent their credentials automatically to the registered email. If delivery fails, the platform lets you know so you can share them manually.

Can I change the configuration after creating the lab?

The economic parameters are fixed when the lab is created. What you can adjust at any time are the closing dates, the visible modules and the teams' credentials.

What happens if a team does not submit decisions?

When the period closes, that company is processed with default values (no management) — it no longer inherits its previous decisions — and receives the no-submission penalty you chose when creating the lab (cash fine + less demand, which increases if it happens again). The lab is never blocked by an inactive team. Details in section 4d.

How do I delete a lab created by mistake?

Only labs in Draft state (not yet activated) can be deleted, from the Dashboard or their management screen. Once active, let it run or finish it.