Flexee ERP
A $3.4 billion enterprise transformation at Granville Industrial Corporation, a Fortune 100 industrial multinational with eight autonomous business units. Four executive roles — CEO, CFO, CIO, Program Director — each with a different view of the same situation. Ten rounds, five pivot decisions, a decade of compounding consequences.
Students don't read about a failed ERP program. They live through one.
Built for MIS graduate courses. Pairs with The Phoenix Project.In 2003 the board of Granville Industrial Corporation — a Fortune 100 industrial multinational with eight autonomous business units — approves a $3.4 billion enterprise logistics transformation. The executive team is given eighteen months to demonstrate progress. What follows is ten years. Stage gates under pressure. Foundational work that may or may not be real. An architecture lock-in. A vendor protest. A quiet scope transfer. An invisible year. An audit that surfaces what everyone already knew. Four pivots. And eventually — a cancellation decision, or a program that actually delivers working capability.
Every decision point, every consequence, every failure pattern in the simulation is anchored to real-world evidence — drawn from published analyses of enterprise IT failures, federal oversight reports, post-mortem investigations, and investigative journalism covering the major ERP disasters of the 2000s and 2010s. The company, the vendors, and the executives are fictional. The decision dynamics are not.
Every round, four executives submit recommendations from inside their own role. The CEO sees summary dashboards and strategic framing. The CFO sees cost line items and contract modifications. The CIO sees technical detail and the risk register. The Program Director sees operational reality at the PMO level. No single role has the full picture. The team's job is to share information, trust what the other roles see, and resolve the disagreements that emerge — the way real executive committees actually work.
Each round represents one year. Five pivots shape the outcome.
Six decision categories that run through the ten-year arc. Each one is a choice every enterprise transformation faces — and each one is a choice where honest answers carry short-term cost, and dishonest answers carry long-term cost.
Broad, narrow, or defer. Go big across all eight business units, start small with logistics only, or pause for As-Is analysis first. The first decision locks in the operating conditions for the next decade.
Strategic framingThree-way CFO/COO/CIO sponsorship, two-way CFO/CIO only, or a single Chief Transformation Officer. Each structure creates different escalation patterns, different blind spots, different rates of decision gridlock.
Governance designDeclare As-Is and To-Be documentation complete, or acknowledge it isn't. Nearly every ERP failure in the evidence base traces back to this decision. The honest call delays the program. The dishonest call delays the consequences.
Program hygieneApprove the gate despite missing prerequisites. Grant conditional approval with a deadline. Or defer until the foundational work is done. The board pressures one direction. The program consequences pressure the other.
Governance disciplineFive pivot rounds force hard calls. Lock the architecture. Transfer scope to another business unit. Survive a phase review. Acknowledge trouble to the board. Cancel the program, or recommit. Each pivot asks: what's actually true here?
Course correctionReport status to the board, to the divisions, to the auditors. Acknowledge what's incomplete, or frame it as on track. The pressure to frame favorably compounds across rounds — until an audit, a protest, or a cancellation makes framing impossible.
Organizational honestySix design elements that separate Flexee ERP from case discussions, Harvard-style protagonist analyses, and every other transformation simulation — because none of them put the student in the decision seat with incomplete information for ten years running.
The CEO sees summary dashboards and strategic framing. The CFO sees cost line items and contract modifications. The CIO sees technical detail and the risk register. The Program Director sees PMO operational reality. No single role has the full picture. Teams succeed or fail based on how well they share what they see — and recognize what they can't. This recreates the actual governance pathology that drives real-world ERP failures.
Every status report carries a reliability rating. Some sources are reliable — internal audit, direct executive memos. Some have commercial interest — vendor communications, advisory firms bidding for follow-on work. Some are political — board chairs signaling pressure, functional leaders protecting turf. Students read between the lines to separate signal from noise, just as real executives do.
Eight autonomous business units. A named CEO and executive team. Documented vendor relationships. Specific quantitative detail at every stage — cost figures, user populations, interface counts, contract modification volumes, milestone delays, and organizational turnover statistics. Students engage with enough texture to feel they are operating in a real organization.
Cost Performance, Schedule Performance, Capability Delivery, Stakeholder Confidence — equal weight. Cost Performance can only degrade, just like real ERP programs: you cannot recover ground once it has bled away. Decisions that look good on one dimension often look bad on another, and the scoring makes the hidden cost of early bad decisions visible round by round.
Every decision point, every consequence, every failure pattern traces to documented research — published analyses of enterprise IT failures, federal oversight reports, post-mortem investigations by independent bodies, and investigative journalism covering the major ERP disasters of the 2000s and 2010s. The companies and executives are fictional. The decision dynamics are not.
Designed as the experiential companion to Gene Kim's The Phoenix Project and the broader enterprise-IT failure literature MIS graduates will encounter. The debrief after Round 10 ties the team's own outcomes back to the patterns in the reading — making the failure modes memorable in a way that reading alone cannot.
Built for graduate MIS courses focused on enterprise IT, project governance, and executive decision-making. Four-person teams, one per role. A full ten-round run typically takes two to three hours of active play plus inter-round discussion — run in a single intensive session or distributed across a semester. Runs in any browser. No commercial enterprise software required, no IT department conversation, no licensing reviews.
Four executive roles per team — CEO, CFO, CIO, Program Director. Each role receives its own dashboard, memos, and information envelope.
Each role reads their round package and enters a recommendation with rationale. The team meets, shares what they see, and converges on decisions.
Engine processes the round. Cost, Schedule, Capability, and Confidence scores update. The cross-team comparison dashboard reveals who made which calls.
Between rounds, the instructor draws out structural lessons. The post-mortem at Round 10 ties outcomes back to the paired reading and the broader failure literature.
Round 1 — CFO internal memo
"I want to flag concern about the foundational work. We have a strategic vision but no operational blueprint. Every major ERP implementation I have seen fail in the past fifteen years failed because the business process work was skipped or rushed. I recommend we complete As-Is documentation before chartering the scope. Yes, it will take six to nine months. It will save us years of rework later."
CFO Warren Lindquist — the memo every team reads before their first decision
Your implementation guide
Sales, implementation, and training for Flexee ERP. He'll help you map the simulation to your course — how to pace the ten rounds across a semester or compress them into a single-session intensive, how to pair it with The Phoenix Project, and how to structure the debrief around role information and pivot decisions.
CPIM · CSCP · CLTD · CTSC
Book a thirty-minute walkthrough. We'll show you the CFO's Round 1 package, walk through a pivot decision, and help you think through where Flexee ERP fits your MIS curriculum.