This note begins with an overview of reinsurance contacts - their mechanics, types and pricing. It then discusses the structure of the reinsurance industry and the impact of recent crises on this industry.
In late 2010, Silicon Valley-based Chegg, the leading online college textbook rental company, is scaling rapidly. The case recounts Chegg's history from its origins as a distant competitor to Craigslist in college classified listings through a pivot into textbook rental followed by a period of explosive growth. Resulting challenges in scaling warehouse operations, customer service, and information technology are described, along with efforts to professionalize sourcing/pricing and product management functions. The case closes with questions about how Chegg should respond to the pending transition from printed textbooks to electronic textbooks.
This technical note uses information from the Canadian Bankruptcy Act, the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act, and the Personal Property Security Act to explain the way in which collateral security is obtained and to describe the rights of security holders in the event of bankruptcy or reorganization. The note includes the ranking of secured creditors and the most commonly recognized types of security interests.
OPOWER, a software startup that helps utilities engage their customers in ways that reduce energy consumption, is scaling rapidly. The company's new head of product management has designed a system to address a point of constant tension: whether to build custom features in response to new customers' requests, even if these custom features entail expensive departures from OPOWER's product roadmap. The system grants Sales a number of tokens it can "spend" annually on engineering work to build custom features - boosting the odds of signing contracts with new customers. In December 2010, a request for proposal from a very large utility will put the token system to the test, because the customer is demanding a custom feature that would be unusually disruptive to develop.
James Gutierrez has started a socially responsible consumer lending company focused on serving the underbanked Hispanic market. The company has gone through a succession of sales directors and Gutierrez has now pinned his hopes on his operations director Sam Ulloa to help stem the tide. Can Ulloa do it? The future of Progreso Financiero depends on it.
This case is appropriate for undergraduate, MBA, and MBA Exec audiences but is specifically designed for Decision Analysis and Decision Analysis and Optimization, first-year MBA electives. It is related to but separable from "Salmones Puyuhuapi (A)" (UVA-QA-0749). That A case was about whether to harvest salmon early due to the threat of a virus, and it used a simple approximation for relating the value of a harvested salmon to its live weight. This production planning case addresses in detail how harvested salmon are processed and sold. Here, the plan Elisa Perez develops will determine how much value Salmones Puyuhuapi achieves from a day's harvest of salmon from one of the company's sites in southern Chile.
This profile chronicles McDonald's rise over 40 years, its sudden descent in the early 1990s, and then its return in the early 2000s. Students are encouraged to think about what happened, why, and the lessons that can be learned. This profile was written for an undergraduate business course. This case is included in Module 2 of the course Business Thought & Action.
GUIDESlines provides benchmark values of the key economic indicators identified in the GUIDES framework for both developed countries (the OECD) and fast-growing emerging markets (the BRINCS countries).
Barcelo Hotels and Resorts must decide whether to allow its many hotels to continue to undertake separate promotional campaigns or to run, for the first time, a broad corporate-level promotion. Complicating the decision is the fact that the many hotels in its portfolio vary greatly in their character, clientele, positioning, and locations.
In this dialogue-styled case, Binnj’s CEO has assembled a team of people for a 100-day science experiment to determine whether a new high-tech business venture is worth pursuing. He is focused on an untapped market — a new kind of restaurant menu service built on the Apple iPad platform. Members of the team are excited and have been working furiously on the project while retaining their full-time jobs. They have developed a prototype of the technology and business offering, pitched the idea to several clients, and generated significant interest. The case is set at the end of the first 100 days, when the CEO must decide on the next steps.
Keda, a manufacturer of large-scale machinery in China, had successfully deployed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that was paying for itself through more efficient inventory management. This was significant because despite China’s increasing demand for ERP systems, an estimated 80 per cent of ERP implementation efforts failed in the country. The vice general manager of Keda had a large backlog of other information technology projects, and he wanted to carefully evaluate the ERP project to determine what had gone right, what had gone wrong, and what Keda had achieved through simple luck.
Infusion had grown over the 10 years between 2000 and 2010 to become a $50 million per year international software services business with 350 employees. The president was wondering how he could move the company towards becoming a $100 million per year international business through a mix of organic growth and initiatives with partners. The entrepreneurial vision of its original founders lived on in many ways, but the company had found it necessary to install an administrative structure with a professional management layer to underpin delivery in both domestic and international markets. It had not been an easy ride. The company had encountered problems in India, and there had been periods of staff attrition and challenging deliveries to clients. Clients were beginning to pull the company in new directions. The pace of technology change appeared to be relentless. While entrepreneurship was still encouraged in the form of an idea incubator called Infusion Angels, the CEO was faced with some critical decisions.
Henry Silva, a soon-to-be Columbia MBA graduate and aspiring change agent, wrestled with the decision about whether to join New Power LLC, an innovative start-up energy company, as the director of special projects. In this new capacity, he would be responsible for the transformation of the company culture with the goal of creating a more dynamic and productive work environment. What steps would be necessary to win over employees and to implement a successful change agenda?
PCL is a leading European consumer electronics, lifestyle and healthcare company that has been operating in the Chinese market since 1995. While its consumer electronics business has grown quickly in China, it has discovered that the costs of returned goods in its TV division equal 5% of its sales. Even more worrying is that 37% of the products returned are of good quality and have been returned without good reason. PCL has set up taskforces to study and remedy the situation and has uncovered a more serious problem within the organisation: control measures designed to handle returns have simply not been executed by its staff and third-party after-sales service centres. What can PCL do to ensure enforcement of company policies in the future?
In 2009, the small heavy marine transport company Fairstar entered into bidding on one of the largest contracts in the history of the industry. Chronicles the company's year-long tendering process, leading up to a final make-or-break meeting.
In January 2009, Pfizer announced its acquisition of Wyeth in a cash and stock deal valued at $68 billion. This deal represented the first mega-acquisition since the world economic crisis, which began in September 2008. Jeff Kindler knew that the last acquisition (Pharmacia in 2003) had not gone as planned. Was Pfizer prepared for the Wyeth acquisition? Would it solve some of Pfizer's pressing problems or create new ones?