Mitchell Memorial Hospital is a 750-bed regional academic medical center in Ohio. Andy Prescott, Chief of the Cardiovascular Center, is reviewing the performance evaluations of his star vascular surgeon Ron Ventura. The evaluations, the result of a 360-degree performance review cycle the hospital had recently put in place, were much more critical than he had anticipated. Ventura, with a national reputation as an accomplished vascular surgeon, had improved the vascular surgery practice enormously in his short tenure at Mitchell Memorial and generated much new case flow for the hospital. Ventura is also, as the evaluation packet made clear, sharp-tongued, impatient, and abrasive. Prescott knows that the Cardiovascular Center needs team players, but he also has a responsibility to improve the performance of the vascular surgery practice, and Ventura is critical to that effort. Now Ventura's contract is up for renewal. Although Prescott recruited Ventura and gave strong support in his first months, other surgeons are now considering leaving the hospital, HR is getting complaints from the nursing staff and the residency programs, and many point to Ventura's behavior as the cause. Prescott wonders whether Ventura's actions violate Mitchell Memorial's cultural norms focused on teamwork and collaboration and whether or not his contract with the hospital should be renewed. Students must consider approaches to the upcoming performance feedback interview between Prescott and Ventura.
Multiasistencia, a major Spanish BPO of insurance repairs, is changing the relational contract with its service profesionals from a referral model to a guaranteed workload one.
In June 2012, Standard & Poor's Indices is finalizing a deal with the CME Group, the largest global exchange for futures and options and majority owner of Dow Jones Indexes, to combine their respective indices business into a new joint venture called S&P Dow Jones Indices. This case discusses the index provider business model through the lenses of this transaction: sources of revenue and profitability, business valuation, uses of indexes in the money management industry, types of indexes, intellectual property protection issues, and competition, marketing, and growth opportunities. The case makes special emphasis on the strategic drivers for business consolidation and combination in an environment of increased competition, trends toward self-indexation, and growth of indexing at a global scale.
Bashar Masri is developing the first new stand-alone Palestinian city 25 kilometers north of Jerusalem and 9 kilometers north of Ramallah in the West Bank on 6300 dunams (1556 acres) for 40,000 people with financial support from the Qatari investment authority and assistance from The Portland Trust. The first phase with 5000 homes along with a commercial city center, parks, schools and other public facilities will be available for occupancy in 2014. The eventual $1.5 billion new city has a host of start up problems including what should be built when and at what price along with infrastructure issues.
James White, the new CEO of Jamba Juice, has successfully averted bankruptcy and must now decide the future path for Jamba Juice, the leader in the smoothie and fresh bar industry. This two part case presents the various strategic options White is considering. It then asks participants to determine the best strategic path and how this path should be specifically implemented. The follow on (B) case describes what White actually did and presents the results.
James White, the new CEO of Jamba Juice, has successfully averted bankruptcy and must now decide the future path for Jamba Juice, the leader in the smoothie and fresh bar industry. This two part case presents the various strategic options White is considering. It then asks participants to determine the best strategic path and how this path should be specifically implemented. The follow on B case describes what White actually did and presents the results.
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the nine simulator exercises let students explore horizontal differentiation with and without price setting, strategic complements and substitutes and their implications for commitment and for first-mover advantage, the effect of the number of competitors on the competitiveness of a market, capacity limitations and judo economics, natural monopoly and the effect of market size, technology choice as entry deterrence, endogenous economies of scale, and capacity limitation in commodity markets. It can be used to introduce these concepts without necessarily relying on a lot of math or as an intuitive complement to a more mathematical exposition.
The framework of strategic complements and substitutes can help companies anticipate competitors' responses. It is particularly helpful in deciding on price- or capacity-commitments (or pre-emption), but it can provide more general guidance for analyzing the potential impact of commitments and pre-emption.
Operations Strategy bridges the gap between the strategic plan directed by executives and the emergent strategy that occurs through the many decisions of managers and employees. The goal of operations strategy is to optimize operations' resources to best fulfill the strategic objectives of the firm. There are two central elements to an effective operations strategy. The first element provides the long-term objectives for operations in support of company strategy and answers the question, "What do we have to do?" The second offers a plan to meet those objectives and answers the follow-up question, "How are we going to do it?" A resource-based operations strategy framework offers a way to evaluate operations strategy by looking at the resources that influence a firm's ability to create and deliver its primary offerings. There are 5 categories of resources: Physical Resources; Human Resources; Intellectual Property, Software, and Methods; Ecosystem Resources; and Financial Resources. In the framework each category is described in terms of the resources and their uses, the way they are integrated with one another into systems, and the plans for future development. Strategic alignment is the level to which the complete operating system is able to implement the company's strategy.
The long-term success of an organization depends on the methods used to deliberately shape a firm's approach to maintaining quality standards. While a systematic approach to managing and improving quality using statistical tools can be very effective, attaining high levels of quality often depends on organizational culture and the quality of executive leadership. This Reading begins with an explanation of the dimensions of quality, focusing on the distinctions between performance quality and conformance quality. The next section explores the issues connected with the cost of quality by exploring the question: How should organizations think about the cost and value of different levels of conformance quality? It concludes with the topic of problem-solving in an operations setting. Fast and effective problem-solving is essential for preventing problems from getting worse over time.
An organization's strategic sourcing decisions determine where and how it procures products and services. Choosing which resources and capabilities to develop internally and which to procure externally requires an understanding of the firm's business and operations strategies, its current and potential operational profile, and any external threats or opportunities. This Reading covers sourcing decisions, such as make-or-buy decisions, as well as decisions on where and how production takes place (the tradeoff's geographic proximity degree of integration and information-sharing, contractual conditions, and the optimal number of suppliers) in both manufacturing and services, domestically and globally.
Waiting lines, sometimes called queuing situations, are encountered widely in business operations. Improvements to the waiting-line process can result in better use of labor, equipment, and facilities, and a greater capability to provide customers with a level of service that matches the business objective. This Reading presents methods for determining the resources needed to provide particular service attributes in waiting-line situations. It emphasizes developing intuition regarding the impact of utilization, system size, and variability on performance characteristics. It includes an explanation of an approximation formula for determining the average waiting time and line length for queuing situations and covers managing customer perceptions of waiting.
This case examines a distinctive leadership development program within the World Economic Forum. The program, born out of the conviction that the complexity of global challenges at the beginning of the 21st century required a new generation of global leaders, recruited a small number of "high potential" young leaders from around the world as "Global Leadership Fellows" each year. During the three-year program, Fellows combined a position at the Forum with formal classroom training modules, one-on-one coaching, peer mentoring, and extensive assessment. The case explores the Forum's understanding of its role in the world, the vision of leadership that animates the program, and the structure and content of the program. It asks how successful the program has been in providing the kind of transformational experience it envisions and whether it could or should be replicated by other organizations.
"This case serves to illustrate how averaging point forecasts harnesses the wisdom of crowds. Students access data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and compare the performance of the crowd (i.e., the average point forecasts) to the average performance of the individual panelists and the best performer from the previous period. The case is intended for use in a class on forecasting, and the instructor can present it in three ways: with all necessary SPF data cleaned and preprocessed in a student spreadsheet (UVA-QA-0805X, provided with the case); with code (also provided in the student spreadsheet) written by the case authors in R, the statistical computing package, as well as a supplementary handout (UVA-QA-0805H, also provided with the case), which walks students through R code, explaining how to clean and analyze the SPF data; or as a team project to be worked on over several days, providing neither the spreadsheet nor the supplement. The latter would be an excellent exercise in data retrieval, cleaning, reshaping, and analysis."
This is the Spreadsheet Supplement for Montague Corporation: Unfolding the Future in Cycling (Case #808087). Includes Exhibit 3, Exhibit 5, Exhibit 6, and Exhibit 8.