The administrator of the Westmount Retirement Residence is concerned about the current cost accounting system. The administrator is not clear on how much each service offered was truly costing, and therefore charged each resident the same price per month regardless of their needs. In the past, the majority of patients demanded similar services, and therefore this pricing and costing system was appropriate. However, with demographic changes to the population, some residents required intense medical care, while others were healthy and fit and required less care. A new pricing model had to be developed that reflected both the size of suite inhabited and the level of medical care and service required by each individual patient.
The manager of occupational health and safety services at the London Health Science Centre (LHSC) is a member of a team developing a plan to prepare LHSC to manage various issues in the event of an influenza pandemic, particularly in its hospitals. Such an event would place severe strain on LHSC's employees and on the organization's ability to provide health care to the public. The manager has to resolve several ethical concerns while ensuring compliance with the Ontario Health and Safety Act. She also has to recommend how best to communicate the plan to the LHSC staff.
The Russian Federation (Russia) was the largest of the 15 geopolitical entities that emerged in 1991 from the Soviet Union. Despite a series of reforms initiated in 1992 to help the country transition from its centrally planned economy, Russia plunged into a deep recession that was exacerbated by a financial crisis in 1998. It was not until 1999, following eight years of turmoil, macroeconomic stabilization and economic restructuring, that the economy slowly began to grow again. When Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became president on December 31, 1999, Russia was the world's tenth-largest economy and its foreign reserves stood at $8.5 billion. By 2007, the country's economy had become the world's eighth-biggest, with reserves of $407.5 billion. In May 2008, when Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, was inaugurated and Putin assumed the role of prime minister, western companies with interests in Russia faced great uncertainty. Would Putin's hand-picked successor, under Putin's powerful and watchful eye, continue to enact policies and take actions that would make the business environment increasingly unfavorable to foreign investment? Or, would the new regime chart a more liberal and democratic course for Russia that would enable the country to improve its global competitiveness and allow outside investors to participate in its prosperity? Russia had made great strides to improve its position in the world since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Yet, it remained to be seen whether the country, particularly under its current circumstances, could create and sustain lasting international competitive advantage, which many western critics believed would require a more democratic political regime. This paper provides a brief overview of the country and explores the status of China's competitive advantage through the framework of Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage of Nations.
Set against the backdrop of under-served, over-exploited rural India, this case highlights how the use of technology by the Indian conglomerate ITC transformed the lives of many rural Indians at the same time that it was benefiting the company. Continually plagued by an inefficient supply chain in rural agriculture, ITC implemented the e-Choupal initiative in 2000. Under the initiative, ITC set up small Internet kiosks in villages that allowed farmers access to an efficient and transparent alternative to the traditional mandi for marketing their produce. By establishing a direct channel between the farmer and ITC, e-Choupal significantly marginalized the role of middlemen, thereby ensuring farmers more money for their produce. In doing so, e-Choupal not only mitigated ITC's agrarian supply chain concerns but also achieved a greater good-the economic uplift and empowerment of the Indian farmer. Although e-Choupal was conceived as ITC's answer to their supply chain woes, ITC was quick to realize that they had discovered the delicate balance between achieving corporate profitability and making a social contribution. Aware of the multitude of challenges faced by impoverished rural Indians, ITC extended its e-Choupal framework to deliver core services, such as access to health care, education and information. They even liaised with other companies, including fast-moving consumer goods companies and finance companies, to deliver products and services to rural Indians that had previously commanded huge premiums or were simply unavailable. Evolving into a platform for community development, e-Choupal was both eradicating poverty and chipping away at rural isolation, even while ITC continued to enjoy the benefits of functional procurement and distribution value chains.
This case describes how a company improves resource efficiency and process quality in its manufacturing process by developing a waste by-product into a new product. The case describes how CCP cleans production equipment between batches using styrene, which becomes a costly hazardous waste. Having worked on minimizing waste for the past 20 years, CCP believed it could not reduce the use of styrene without risking product quality. Instead, CCP was exploring the development of a by-product from its "rinse styrene," but faces uncertainty regarding the operational, financial, and environmental implications of doing so. This case contains data to support quantitative analyses of financial, operational, and environmental issues including some basic life-cycle analysis (LCA) calculations that focus on greenhouse gas emissions.
Marc Buoniconti is the co-founder of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a nonprofit medical research organization. The project was founded in 1985 by Marc and his father Nick, a former Hall of Fame football player, when Marc suffered a spinal cord injury. In 2007, Marc was still confined to a wheelchair, but the Miami project had developed into the world's largest spinal cord injury research and treatment center. It had 250 employees, operated from a $37 million state of the art facility located on the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine campus, and had raised in excess of $275 million since its inception. However, there was still no cure for spinal cord injury, and many of the project's supporters were becoming anxious for a substantial clinical breakthrough. Fundraising was always a concern, particularly as government spending on research was declining. Marc and his father were keenly aware of the challenge of maintaining the enthusiasm and financial backing of the Miami Project's supporters. Yet they needed to avoid over-promising regarding the likelihood of potential breakthroughs, which required painstaking research and stringent clinical trials. The leadership also questioned whether the mission should remain focused on spinal cord injury, or whether it should broaden to include brain trauma and other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Case provides an opportunity to discuss the challenges of non-profit management, medical research, and to debate appropriate strategy for the Miami Project in 2007.
In 2005, COFCO Ltd., one of China's largest and most successful companies, acquired Xinjiang Tunhe, a tomato processing firm, which had been, in recent years, poorly managed. COFCO changed Tunhe's management team and set out to create a culture of professionalism and impressed upon the employees that the customer came first. Qin Yelong, Tunhe president, had ambitious goals for the company. he wanted Tunhe to be the world's largest supplier of tomato products (primarily paste) within three years. To do so, Tunhe needed to secure relationships with top-of-the-line international customers, such as H.J. Heinz and Unilever. These companies were interested in Tunhe as a supplier, but needed assurances that the company could provide a reliable supply of high quality, competitively priced, and safe tomato paste year in and year out before they would finalize long term contracts with Tunhe. Qin and his management team knew that to be number one, Tunhe would need to take a lead role in modernizing China's current "peasant mode of agriculture." Indeed, Tunhe's tomato supply came from 200,000 mainly uneducated farmers, working small parcels of land (less than 0.2 hectare on average) with little to no mechanization, scattered across the regions of Northwest China. The challenge: How to manage so many farmers (the number was expected to grow to 300,000 if Qin's revenue targets were achieved) so as to ensure consistent tomato quality and safety without dramatically increasing costs. Qin realized that Tunhe had an opportunity to create a new mode of agriculture, which could be the model for all agribusiness in China moving forward. On the other hand, a misstep could lead Heinz and other large international companies to look elsewhere for their supply requirements.
The administrator of the Westmount Retirement Residence is concerned about the current cost accounting system. The administrator is not clear on how much each service offered was truly costing, and therefore charged each resident the same price per month regardless of their needs. In the past, the majority of patients demanded similar services, and therefore this pricing and costing system was appropriate. However, with demographic changes to the population, some residents required intense medical care, while others were healthy and fit and required less care. A new pricing model had to be developed that reflected both the size of suite inhabited and the level of medical care and service required by each individual patient.
The manager of occupational health and safety services at the London Health Science Centre (LHSC) is a member of a team developing a plan to prepare LHSC to manage various issues in the event of an influenza pandemic, particularly in its hospitals. Such an event would place severe strain on LHSC's employees and on the organization's ability to provide health care to the public. The manager has to resolve several ethical concerns while ensuring compliance with the Ontario Health and Safety Act. She also has to recommend how best to communicate the plan to the LHSC staff.
The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) considered how to advise the company's chief executive officer (CEO). As a company in the space industry, MDA relied on its exports to the United States. Joint ventures were helpful in securing contracts from the U.S. government but they were not always advantageous in other ways because these ventures required partnerships with competitors. At this time, MDA had no long term strategy to address this issue. The supplements MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (B) and (C) look at subsequent events that were unforeseen at this particular time.
The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) had been informed that U.S.-based Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK) had proposed a takeover of MDA's main business line - its security and intelligence business. The director was faced with several financial and ethical dilemmas which he needed to resolve before meeting with the board. The supplement MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (C) looks at the decisions that were made and the results of these decisions.
MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (C) is the third part of a three-part case. The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) reflects upon the past two-and-a-half months. He and other members of the board of directors faced difficult decisions but were pleased to see that their decisions had almost unanimous support from stockholders. As he read the business section of the newspaper, he wondered whether the decisions had been considered carefully with all the stakeholders in mind.
A consultant with CARE Enterprise Partners (CEP) is tasked to provide consulting for three social enterprises in different stages of development, each benefiting from CEP funding and support. CONASE - an oatmeal manufacturer selling to the government's vaso de leche free breakfast program - asked for advice on strategic analysis and creative approaches to customer relations. Seviagro - a market linkage social enterprise aggregating produce from smallholder artichoke farmers for resale to a large processing and export company - requested support with cost analysis and accounting. Corporacion Solar - initially established as a buyer and reseller of spinach produced by Andean farmers but currently transitioning from a market linkage model to a hybrid model - was looking for assistance in reshaping its growth strategy to target major buyers in Lima with a more diversified product offering. The three for-profit social enterprises profiled in this case sample a new breed of locally-reliant, market-driven models, which could further Peru's rural development in mountainous regions like the Ancash province. Their success could be tremendously influential in charting a new approach to development in the Andes. Success here could also endorse CEP's pioneering approach to development around the world. But despite careful start-up planning and very promising triple-bottom line projections, each enterprise confronted unexpected challenges in customer relations, cost management, sourcing and distribution. As these social ventures were getting off the ground, their founders' ability to simultaneously meet their social goals and remain economically viable was in jeopardy. The case asks students to put themselves in the consultant role and reposition these social ventures for sustainable growth.
As of mid-2008, Regio's sole shareholder, chairman and president is leading his team through a strategy refreshing process. Regio, an Estonian company established in 1989 as a map-maker, is now involved in four principal business activities: location-based services for mobile phones, geographical information systems (GIS) software development, the creation of geospatial data and the production of maps. The company's current revenues are about 5 million euro dollars and the president is wondering what he can do to propel the company to new heights of 40 million euro dollar to 50 million euro dollars in revenues by 2015.
A carpenter is considering options for improving the manufacturing process of his custom wood-flooring concept. He started the business as a part-time venture and wanted to increase production efficiency to accommodate the growing interest for his pine flooring design. The carpenter was unsure whether he should invest in new equipment or hire part-time labour, but he knew that either way, he would have to change the current process to ensure that capacity would meet the upcoming year's forecasted demand.
This case provides students with a deeper understanding of commodity futures markets in general and natural gas markets in particular. It also provides an introduction to hedge funds and insight into the largest hedge fund collapse in history. Third, it introduces such concepts as liquidity risk, value-at-risk, spread trades and the use of derivatives. As of the case date, Amaranth had not publicly disclosed the positions that led to $6 billion in losses during the month of September 2006. The case was written using public information and provides key pieces of data to allow students to reverse engineer possible positions Amaranth may have held.
Students must assess the opportunity of purchasing a business as well as evaluate the likelihood that the potential investor, as a sole proprietor, will receive the required financing. This analysis should include the 4 Cs: character, business conditions, capacity to repay and collateral analysis. This analysis will also entail the qualitative examination of the business to be purchased, the new potential owner's personal characteristics, the dental industry and the location of the proposed business. Following the analysis, students should analyze the opportunity quantitatively by including the preparation and analysis of a statement of cash flows, ratio analysis, projected financial statements and, finally, an analysis of the available sources of collateral to be pledged for the loan.
The chief financial officer of Pixonix Inc. is trying to decide if she should hedge, given the current strength of the Canadian dollar. Her company licenses proprietary software through a U.S. company that will cost $7.5 million in three months time. The case provides the students with the opportunity to understand the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on her firm's cash flows and some of the instruments available to manage risk, including puts and calls and forward contracts.
The financial system is the heart of free market economies. The 2007-2008 financial crisis raised concerns that the global financial and economic system might experience a truly substantial collapse. New financial instruments had proliferated to the degree that it had become impossible to calculate the market value of many of them, and so it had become impossible to know the market value of institutions that held them or that guaranteed them. The initial disaster occurred with the U.S. subprime residential mortgage market, but it quickly spread globally to institutions that held new financial instruments related to these mortgages. Firms that had guaranteed these financial instruments found that their net worth was disappearing, leading to concerns about the institutions that had relied on their guarantees. Meanwhile, new kinds of hedge funds introduced the risk of greater volatility, and they exposed investors to sudden shocks. Many banks were caught in this web and suddenly had to obtain additional equity capital in order to meet regulatory requirements and maintain the confidence of depositors. As a result of these developments, liquidity disappeared from the financial system. It seemed that recession in the United States was inevitable. Previous expectations that other economies had become decoupled for the United States were being replaced by fears that economies throughout the world would follow the United States into recession. Central banks reacted dramatically with attempts to reduce interest rates and to increase financial liquidity, and the U.S. government cut personal taxes through a tax refund program. It was not clear whether monetary and fiscal policies could prevent a long and deep recession. Debate arose concerning the advisability of a wide variety of new regulations that might be able to prevent future recurrence of such a financial crisis.