Jacob Zimmermann has seen his revenues and profits declining for the last three years after MegaRols entered his local market and has reduced sales of his Rolex watch offerings in his Midwestern retail store. Bonne Chance has been selected by Swatch to offer their line, which may be an opportunity to revive sales during the upcoming Holiday season and into 2011. The bank loan officer has covered the recent overdraft, but she won't extend more credit. Already behind on some older invoices, cash is very tight, Zimmermann has thirty days to come up with the first payment for stocking the Swatch inventory. He has a number of options to boost sales and liquidate inventory to cover his upcoming purchases of non-Rolex inventory items. Each has an impact on his cash flow and has to be carefully assessed against the reaction from his long time customers Rolex and MegaRols.
Johannes Linden is the Director of the Washer and Dryer division of Fluss, a large Swiss appliance manufacturer. Soon after the company completes its revenue projections and bonus targets for the upcoming year, Linden shares some good news with his leadership team, the Global Executive Committee (GEC): an internal R&D effort to develop cheaper steel for the company's products has finished a year ahead of schedule. This will translate into a significant reduction in costs across the division. When Linden proposes readjusting revenue expectations and sales targets accordingly, he is surprised to find that the GEC does not agree with him. Among other issues, employee bonuses are involved. Linden, with a reputation for being open and knowledgeable yet sometimes intimidating, tries to convince the committee to come around to his way of thinking.
The case examines Ritz's processes, leadership, technology, systems, and people as they align to achieve long term goals. In 1992, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain won the top US industry prize for excellence in quality and service. However, customer demand for value, as well as growing competition within the hotel industry, was making it harder for the company to continue this legacy. Students learn about Ritz-Carlton's history and corporate philosophy, and analyze the challenges of being a quality service provider. Issues addressed include how the company should remedy defects in its customer service, achieve its customer retention goals, and maintain a culture of service while experiencing rapid growth.
Founded by Columbia Business School classmates, Frogtek was created as a technology business with a social mission: to help micro-retailers in Latin America improve their operations through applications loaded onto mobile phones. While the market was large - 400,000 micro-retailers operated in Colombia alone - and store owners appeared interested in the service, the right approach was far from clear. The company's founders struggled with questions such as how to distribute the mobile applications and how much to charge the generally low-income store owners. In this case students work on an operational strategy for the seed-funded start-up after examining its business plan, social goals, market opportunity, and competitive environment. This case covers operational, entrepreneurial, and technological challenges in micro-retail and supply chain management in developing economies. The focus is on the "bottom of the pyramid" retail context.
The owner and director of a residential summer camp for children recognizes the need to make some changes to achieve his primary objective of increasing the number of campers. Specifically, marketing initiatives are needed to bolster the August sessions, a month when the camp experiences declining enrolment. He has some key decisions to make, including which group to target, how to promote the camp sessions, and what to charge for any new product offerings.
This case chronicles the origins and growth of Sorbet, a chain of beauty salons targeting upper income women in South African metropolitan areas. Owner Ian Fuhr identified an opportunity to redefine the beauty salon experience in South Africa by offering customers a service unlike anything in the industry. He carefully managed human resources to motivate employees and grow the client base. To complement this, the company started an external beauty therapy school to improve staff and train potential employees. In addition, Fuhr stressed the importance of growing brand awareness and carefully adjusted the company's sales mix to maximize all potential profit margins, all while developing a customer-centric culture. The case concludes by informing the reader of two new businesses that had recently been launched under the Sorbet brand and discusses the possible options of expansion and diversification that were open to the company.
The president of Infusion Development Corporation was reviewing the progress of the new subsidiary the company had set up 15 months earlier in Krakow, Poland. The purpose of the subsidiary was to work with other Infusion offices around the world to provide innovative software development services to global clients. The investment, a big success, had grown in size from eight to forty staff in one year, and there were plans to double that by the end of the following year. The issues facing the president were threefold. Firstly, how could he work with the country manager to continue to grow the subsidiary? Attracting the right talent was vital to Infusion's culture and business model. Initial growth in Poland was based partly on local referrals in the community of .NET professionals in Krakow. It was also based on being a new start-up with an entrepreneurial culture. The president and country manager were concerned that there were limits to these factors. Secondly, what role should Infusion Poland have in the wider company in the future? Should it become a global centre of excellence and a pivotal hub for the company's innovative capability? If so, how? Thirdly, what kind of succession planning should be put in place for the country manager in Poland? If he moved to another post at Infusion, as expected, should the company seek a local country manager instead of transferring one from headquarters?
Financial accounting entries must be made for a small Canadian oil and gas exploration and drilling company headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, for a project in northern Saskatchewan.
A company that has a fleet of food trucks serving Thai food has issued bonds twice since its incorporation. Because the company has reached a level of maturity and is in the sixth year of operations, it is able to recall a portion of one of the bonds. The other bonds mature. Students are asked to record the transactions related to these bonds.
In just a decade, the Danish health care product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a major transformation from a local Danish manufacturing company to a truly multinational corporation. In 2001, Coloplast conducted all its production in-house in three production facilities in Denmark. Ten years later, the company had relocated almost 90 per cent of the production to four different countries, with the majority in Hungary and China. However, a transformation of this caliber rarely comes without challenges. Coloplast's relocation of production abroad had to a large extent been carried out through a trial-and-error process without an overarching corporate strategy. In this process, the company had experienced many challenges. Although Coloplast had by 2011 successfully identified and changed the critical issues created by the offshoring initiatives, the executive management now faced a substantial challenge in understanding what the company had learned over the last 10 years and how it could excel based on this history.
Marissa Mayer has been asked to think about factors that were impacting Google's ability to innovate and adjust its strategy so that the organization could remain one of the world's foremost leaders in technology. In an industry (and at a company) that was changing and growing exponentially, it would be difficult to pinpoint specific variables and trends. But Mayer knew that one element crucial to Google's ongoing success would be its ability to recruit the best talent available and foster an environment that would encourage that talent to generate the best ideas. As Mayer contemplated how to ensure this, she considered that women currently represented only a small fraction of Google's engineers, suggesting a missed opportunity.
Legacy, Transition, and Growth: The Case of BRIDGE Housing Corporation" concerns the issues that a leading regional nonprofit housing company faced after its charismatic founder, Don Terner, tragically and unexpectedly died. It covers the difficulties faced by the incoming president, who had to preserve the memory of her predecessor while charting new courses for the company. The unusual circumstances illuminate the universal problems of leadership succession in successful businesses. In particular, the case explores the challenges posed created by the growth of an aggressive and entrepreneurial housing development firm with a strong sense of social purpose. Furthermore, the case reveals that a policy of continued growth opened up several alternatives for expanding business, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
Inspired by the experiences in Germany and Spain, Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) developed a pilot feed-in tariff to stimulate investment into solar photovoltaic systems. This case explores the factors behind the decision to promulgate a feed-in tariff, and the factors that affected the design of the tariff and its rate. Once implemented, GRU found that its design created several perverse incentives that led to some unexpected results. The actions GRU took in response to these results are addressed in the epilogue. The case can be taught as either an energy policy case or as a regulatory economics case. Regulation and management issues such as asymmetry of information between the utility and renewable industry are explored. Case Number 1963.0.
Inspired by the experiences in Germany and Spain, Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) developed a pilot feed-in tariff to stimulate investment into solar photovoltaic systems. This case explores the factors behind the decision to promulgate a feed-in tariff, and the factors that affected the design of the tariff and its rate. Once implemented, GRU found that its design created several perverse incentives that led to some unexpected results. The actions GRU took in response to these results are addressed in the epilogue. The case can be taught as either an energy policy case or as a regulatory economics case. Regulation and management issues such as asymmetry of information between the utility and renewable industry are explored.Case Number 1963.1.
India has been an emerging market that is witnessing radical changes in the lifestyles and the spending patterns of customers. There has been a significant change (post-liberalization) in terms of the manner in which consumers look at their self-concept. Exposure to western ways and lifestyles through mass media, availability of discretionary income and the impact of reference group appeals are some of the important aspects that have created interest towards products and services associated with beauty care among consumers. Customers have become used to branded creams and lotions, and several of these offerings are being advertised with strong symbolic appeals associated with enhanced self-concepts. Kaya was a brand in the beauty care category. However, the brand's offerings dealt with medically anchored services intended to enhance the looks of the customers. The brand opened up a new facet of beauty care services that was associated more with up-market and state-of-the-art hospitals, where customers opted for these services under the supervision of doctors who had specialized in cosmetic surgeries/interventions. Would the differentiation between the first-time users of a beauty parlor and the loyal customers of a parlor offer insights that Kaya would find useful? Issues related to services management as well as customer value and customer loyalty were relevant to Kaya's competitive strategies. Although the customers of a beauty parlor could be demographically different from Kaya's customers, the commonality of the benefits related to the beauty services offered were the same. The case is about how a brand that had created a category would find it useful to draw insights on brand loyalty from a related category that does not compete with it directly. Such a dimension of competitive learning is perhaps unique to an emerging market such as India.
The case traces the transformation of The Park Hotels (TPH) from being "yet another hotel" at the time of its founding in 1967 into India's first boutique hotel network. It describes how Priya Paul, the Chairperson, TPH, and her team created a uniquely Indian boutique hotel network - emphasizing intimate and personalized service, and positioning each hotel as an entertainment destination for customers. The case invites students to consider the strategic choices open to the TPH management in 2010 as they grapple with the challenges of sustaining growth, retaining the distinctiveness and individuality of each of the properties in the network even as they cope with growing competition from both global majors (Hyatt, Starwood Hotels, and JW Marriott) and the local giants (The Taj, Oberoi, and ITC Welcomgroup).
The case traces the evolution of ITC Limited (ITC) from its inception as a marketing subsidiary of British American Tobacco (BAT) in 1910 to one of India's most valued diversified corporations. Remarkably, despite being a dominant market leader in the socially undesirable tobacco business, ITC is regarded as a responsible corporate citizen. Even more significantly, ITC which regards itself as an "Indian" company in which BAT, its ''erstwhile parent'' is a large and important ''shareholder'', can be held out as an exemplar of the India Way - looking beyond stockholders' interests to public mission and national purpose - articulated by Professor Peter Cappelli and his colleagues at Wharton. The century long story is captured in five sections. While first section traces the early years of the company, the next four sections present ITC's evolution under its four Indian chairmen. The "Haksar Era" outlines the strong nationalist context in which BAT's stake in ITC was diluted, and the company's diversification into hotels and paperboards businesses. "The Sapru Era" describes the consolidation of market leadership in cigarettes and the company's foray into agri-business. "The Chugh Era" captures the tumultuous relationship between BAT and ITC, and the aborted takeover attempt by BAT. "The Deveshwar Era" traces his initiatives to strengthen the core businesses, diversify into new areas and embed a strong focus on social imperatives. The case concludes with questions on the company's goal to become the No. 1 FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) company in the country, and the succession challenges faced by Deveshwar.
The market for security solutions is highly fragmented with no dominant players in the market. Yash finds himself in a situation in which the Indian banking industry is just about waking up to the emerging threats of cyber security. In order to communicate the value that his products create, he will need to identify the value drivers in the banking space, calibrate this value, and come up with a pricing plan that can effectively capture this value. He will also need to make a plan to roll out his product, part of which involves identifying partners who will help make the commercialization a success.