Lean has been defined as the "relentless pursuit of the elimination of waste." This technical note provides a glossary of terms concerning Lean implementation, including muda, muri, nura, kanban, andon board, SMED, poka-yoke, 5S, gemba, takt time, heijunka, and kaizen.
Is medical travel a viable business opportunity? A group of MBA students consider the pros and cons of starting a business that would send people from the U.S. to India for elective non-emergency surgeries.
In July 1997, Thailand became the first Asian "tiger" economy to abandon its fixed exchange rate system in response to speculative attacks on its currency. Investors started to flee Asia, and the crisis rapidly spread to other countries. Central banks spent billions of dollars to try and defend their currencies, only to seek emergency bailouts from the International Monetary Fund. This case presents a chronology of events that unraveled during the Asian financial crisis from 1997 to the end of 1998.
The case looks at the takeover of the Roaring Dragon Hotel (RDH), a state owned enterprise in south-west China, by global hotelier Hotel International (HI) and discusses the cultural collision and organizational adoptions resulting from the intersections of two significantly different business cultures. Specifically in this case, the focus is on the challenge involved with downsizing, redundancy, communication, cultural sensitivity, strategic planning and in developing strategy. In south-west China in 2002, the RDH business environment was just emerging from the shadow of the planned economy and had retained its guanxi-based organizational culture. At RDH, relationship development and the exchange of favors were still important and occurring on a daily basis and there was little system or efficiency in the hotel's domestic management style and processes. In comparison, Hotel International had a wealth of international experience in providing accommodation, marketing and professional management in servicing the needs of a global market steeped in corporate governance. At the commencement of the management contract there was a deep division separating the organizational cultures of RHD and HI.
Tad O'Malley has just started as an associate with Empire Investment Group. He must evaluate three investment opportunities facing the big leveraged buyout firm. All are global, but each pertains to different offices and each deal has different strengths and weaknesses. Which should he recommend to the partners for additional resources and what does a recommendation mean for his career?
In early January 1989, Irfan Mustafa, General Manager, Personal Products and Market Research, Lever Brothers Pakistan Limited, was wondering what action to take regarding the marketing of the laundry detergent bar RIN, which had been introduced to the Pakistani market in April 1984. The product was specially formulated and promoted as a fabric washer. Mr. Mustafa felt the sales volumes for RIN had reached reasonably satisfactory levels in 1988. However, a recent survey confirmed his suspicion that RIN was primarily being used for dish washing.
In January 2016, Mr. Tahir Raza Mian, Assistant Sales and Marketing Manager at the Avari Hotel Lahore (until 1994 known and operated as the Avari Lahore Ramada Renaissance Hotel), was concerned about the average room rate at the hotel. For the first time since operations began in Lahore, Avari's average room rate has fallen below that of its main competitors, Pearl Continental Hotel, The Nishat Hotel, or Heritage Luxury Suites. Tahir felt that he needed to re-evaluate Avari's current pricing policy in order to develop a plan to remedy the situation before the beginning of the new year.
This case focuses on the legal and managerial evolution of limited-liability firms in China, using the example of the Dasheng cotton mills in Nantong near Shanghai. Dasheng, one of the earliest and most successful industrial enterprises in pre-war China, was founded by the famous entrepreneur Zhang Jian (1853-1926). Having survived various economic and political crises, the Dasheng cotton mills became a state-owned enterprise in 1953. In the wake of the economic reforms the successor to the original Dasheng Enterprise was restructured as the Jiangsu Dasheng Co. Ltd. in 1996. Issues of corporate governance, legal environment, government relations and the role of family business structures are discussed in the context of how they shaped the business environment in pre-war China and continue to influence Chinese enterprise culture in 2008.
EFI has a unique sales compensation challenge. They cannot allocate sales credit for their core product to individual salespeople. So, they've historically paid the sales force as a team. This has worked out fine, since they've been a near-monopoly seller of a single product category. However, this has changed. Not only are they facing new competition in their core product bu they also have diversified into other products that allow them to identify sales by salesperson. Should they pay people individually on these newer products while maintaining the team-pay approach on the core? If so, it would raise a potential problem with shirking on the core product. However, not doing so would perhaps limit the sales of the new products. The case allows for a deep discussion of the bases for variable compensation in sales, including observability of effort and outcome, risk aversion, team vs. individual pay and the marginal impact of effort. The context is also an interesting and important one for sales management: OEM sales.
This is a follow-on case to EFI, Inc. (A). It reports on Dean Mills' decision to implement a new compensation approach that pays 25% of salespeople's bonus, based on their individual sales of software add-on products. He also recommends making public each salesperson's performance against their goal in a report that ranked salespeople from top to bottom each period. Students are asked to react to this new plan.
This is a follow-on case to EFI, Inc. (A) and (B). It reports on the sales force's response to the new plan and provides some data as to their performance in the quarters immediately following the implementation of the new plan.
This note introduces four analytical probability distributions and the underlying uncertain processes from which they can be derived. It demonstrates that, when we can build a reasonable model of an uncertain process, we can use the model to derive the probability distribution from fundamental principles and forgo the chore of estimating the distribution subjectively by assessing fractiles. The probability distributions discussed are the binomial, normal, Poisson, and exponential. The associated processes discussed include counting, accumulation, Poisson, and memoryless. The note emphasizes that, although these probability distributions have many legitimate applications, they are applicable only when the specific assumptions about the underlying processes are satisfied--that is, when the uncertain quantity is obtained from a process similar to the one used to drive the probability distribution in the first place.
Explores the success factors leading to the company's rise to the number three ranking in the aggressively competitive toy industry. LeapFrog has made the strategic decision to expand beyond the toy industry and enter the educational technology and services industry. While leveraging core capabilities and product platforms, this new industry requires that executives define a new business model. Senior executives face a number of challenges in implementing the new business and in sustaining the company's growth.