As companies increasingly rely on data and analytics to make decisions and improve their operations, it becomes clear that data quality can be a major issue. The insights gleaned from data analytics are useful only if the data is of high quality. This note summarizes some common issues that can result in low-quality data and explores the crucial task of data engineering. This note is taught at Darden in the second-year elective, "Digital Operations." It would also be suitable in a course or module covering data analytics.
In June 2021, the chief executive officer of Hallmark Cards Inc., a leading US greeting cards and gifts company, faced challenges as the digitalization of cards was gaining pace. This growing trend forced the company to overhaul its operations. Although it tried to cope with the changing business environment, the company suffered both in revenue and profit marking. The chief executive officer took efficiency-increasing measures and laid off employees from the greeting cards division, retail business, and corporate support functions. He also invested in greeting card digitalization and innovation efforts, but was wondering if he should focus more on efficiency or innovation measures to achieve turnaround for the company's operations. What innovation strategies should he pursue to make Hallmark Cards Inc. relevant to changing consumer preferences?
In 2021, the US grocery industry had been undergoing several changes. The competitive landscape had changed significantly since the first decade of the twenty-first century. Walmart Inc. (Walmart) had emerged as the dominant retailer in all markets leading to bankruptcies and mergers with erstwhile market leaders. However, mistakes made by Walmart in that same period allowed ALDI SÃœD Dienstleistungs-SE & Co. (Aldi) to make its presence felt with Walmart's customers. Aldi was gaining its advantage through rapid expansion, with an increasingly broader assortment of products meant to attract upscale customers. Walmart initially tried to respond by opening small-format stores. Walmart had to decide whether this was the right approach to use to fight Aldi, or whether it was even a worthwhile fight. On the other hand, Aldi needed to be careful with how fast and far it should deviate from the core business model that had been instrumental in its success. Finally, the grocery business model had a growing online component that became more prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, Aldi and Walmart also had essential decisions to incorporate these online aspects into their respective business models.
Bhagwati Steel Centre, a family-owned trading firm located in Ghaziabad, India, was facing a short-term decline in revenue from its core business, trading iron and steel components, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's four partners felt that this was the right time to diversify and expand their business to establish more sources of revenue and income; they were considering diversifying and expanding their business using a business integration strategy and had to choose between two options: backward or forward integration. However, the partners had several financial factors to consider before making the final choice. What factors would influence and determine the better option for the company's cash flow? What effect would a potential boom or bust in the market have on the two proposed expansion strategies and on cash flow? What financial techniques were available to evaluate the two proposals and which should be the preferred technique? Finally, should the company opt for backward or forward integration?
Weekly check-in meetings between managers and their teams or direct reports can feel like a waste of time without an agenda or a shared set of goals and expectations, but they are key opportunities to build trusting manager-employee relationships. The author shares five science-backed steps to help managers structure their one-on-ones with direct reports and team members, along with five key questions managers can focus on when meeting with a direct report.
Set in 2021, this case describes how Amazon and Walmart have been two of the most successful retailers in history and are responsible for changing the rules of the game in the retail industry in the US. Over the years, the two firms had perfected contrasting business models to enable their dominance on the respective offline and online retailing. Walmart's model of low prices and strategic partnerships with suppliers had redefined supply chain practices and lowered system costs through the adoption of information technology. Amazon's online model of convenience of shopping from anywhere, anytime comprised a high-quality user-friendly platform with a large product catalogue, and a widespread and reliable fulfilment infrastructure to deliver the orders quickly to the shopper. In recent years, the growing customer preference for omni-channel retailing, an integrated experience that seamlessly comprised digital and physical retail, had compelled the two companies to make substantive investments in developing capabilities and acquiring resources in what was hitherto the other's domain. This leads to several questions that engage students. With Walmart and Amazon racing to add online and offline retail respectively, would their distinctive business models morph to become similar to each other? Or should each focus on its core strength, while offering the other service (online for Walmart and offline for Amazon) as complementary? Were online and offline retail more suited to different customers and product categories? And did their respective future prospects truly justify the dramatic difference in market capitalisation between the two retailers?
Founded in 2016, Cobalt Robotics, based in Fremont, California, was a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) company that built autonomous workplace robots that were designed to replace or supplement human security guards. Outfitted with over 60 sensors, Cobalt robots patrolled workplaces, leveraging AI and machine learning to identify an array of security risks. Security was of critical importance to companies, and yet human security guards were expensive, exhibited high turnover, and were prone to discipline lapses due to the isolated and repetitive nature of the job. Recruiting suitable talent was also increasingly challenging in the wake of the pandemic and the "great resignation." Cobalt's robots could work around the clock, did not resent repetitive work, and were accurate in their work. By 2022, Cobalt had deployed hundreds of security robots at companies around the world, including DoorDash, Yelp, and Slack. As a Series C venture-backed company which had raised over $90 million to date, Cobalt was under pressure to scale quickly. Yet the company faced a series of challenges and decisions around how to scale, including how to overcome the human-veto factor, which verticals to target, and which distribution channel to use. As Cobalt looked to its future, it envisioned entering into other workplace robotic functions beyond security. The company wondered how this would impact its go-to-market strategy as well.
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households to the electricity market as "negawatt" hours. For each kilowatt-hour of electricity reduced, OhmConnect was paid the same as if a fossil fuel-powered "peaker plant" had generated that kilowatt-hour of electricity. OhmConnect shared a portion of this revenue with its customers in the form of rewards and prizes. By lowering energy demand when the electric grid was stressed, OhmConnect reduced the need for peaker plants to be fired up, saving money and reducing pollution. As of 2022, the company operated in three states in the U.S. with approximately 215,000 users. As a Series D venture that had raised more than $95 million in VC, OhmConnect was under pressure to grow. Yet regulatory hurdles and long lead times on electricity capacity procurement contracts had created significant challenges to scaling. OhmConnect needed to decide whether to continue to expand into new markets one-by-one with its existing business model or pursue a new national product that could attract national marketing partners, possibly lowering OhmConnect's customer acquisition cost. Establishing a national footprint could also enable OhmConnect to build a national data hub on home electricity usage, which, in turn, might open doors to alternative monetization opportunities down the road and allow the company to access broader funding sources, including from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.
This case illustrates how a strong culture, founder-led SME designed and used a unique performance metric-the job security index-to manage through periods of economic uncertainty. The case centers specifically on how the job security index was used in an interactive control process to focus the organization on identifying strategic uncertainties and developing related action plans to survive the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The case explores how the design and use of this metric both influenced, and was influenced by, the firm's broad-based employee ownership incentives.
In January 2021, Girish Hanchate, the vice-president of the industrial distribution segment at SKF India Ltd. (SFK India), located in the Indian city of Pune, was facing a difficult problem. He had to find a way to mitigate the ongoing drop in sales from key industrial customers in India resulting from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with many SKF India customers switching to lower-priced competitors. SKF India had been successfully delivering industry-leading, high-value products, services, and knowledge-engineered solutions to its customers for many years. The company was well respected for its outstanding product quality, performance, and unmatched customer-centric approach. However, Hanchate was wondering if he should rethink the company’s business strategy. The drop in customers meant a significant revenue loss for SKF India because the industrial division was a significant profit driver for the company.
Machine learning has been used to create value in various ways across a broad swath of industries. In this case, students will explore uses for machine learning in the context of the launch of the Disney+ streaming service in November 2019. At the time of the case, Disney already operated two streaming platforms, Hulu and ESPN+. Its new streaming service would launch with an archive of roughly 7,500 TV episodes and 500 films, including wildly popular titles from Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. Yet Disney+ would be entering an increasingly competitive industry dominated by Netflix. Since its pivot from mail-order video to streaming in the early 2000s, Netflix had extensively used machine-learning algorithms to optimize customer experience and retention. In this case, students will assume the (fictitious) role of Margaret Gupta, a senior data scientist, as she ideates machine-learning use cases for Disney's management team. In addition to background information on Disney and Netflix, the case provides students with basic information on use cases and data sources for machine learning. The overarching goal is to give students a general understanding of how machine learning works, learn to recognize potential use cases from a managerial lens, the data required to fuel it, and the possible sources of bias that can arise from that data.
T.V. Narendran, CEO of Tata Steel, India's oldest steel manufacturing firm, had taken concrete business and cultural transformation steps to future-ready the firm since taking over in 2013. He had deleveraged and instilled financial discipline, acquired new businesses, entered new segments and adjacent businesses, and launched digital transformation, agility, safety, and sustainability programs. At the heart of his transformation program lay the digitalization drive. Now, he turned his attention to the firm's burgeoning B2C business. In 2018, the firm had launched an e-commerce platform to sell products directly to retail customers. Now he needed to decide whether to open up this platform to non-Tata group third-party suppliers of ancillary home construction products, like cement, paint, tiles, and other home fittings. Would this create a unique one-stop shop for construction-related goods, or take Tata Steel further away from its core mission? He and his team needed to decide fast.
In January 2021, Girish Hanchate, the vice-president of the industrial distribution segment at SKF India Ltd. (SFK India), located in the Indian city of Pune, was facing a difficult problem. He had to find a way to mitigate the ongoing drop in sales from key industrial customers in India resulting from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with many SKF India customers switching to lower-priced competitors. SKF India had been successfully delivering industry-leading, high-value products, services, and knowledge-engineered solutions to its customers for many years. The company was well respected for its outstanding product quality, performance, and unmatched customer-centric approach. However, Hanchate was wondering if he should rethink the company's business strategy. The drop in customers meant a significant revenue loss for SKF India because the industrial division was a significant profit driver for the company.
This case is set in 2022, a year after Mary Barra, chair and CEO of General Motors (GM), set a goal to phase out production of gas-powered (internal combustion engine [ICE]) vehicles and only sell electric vehicles (EVs) by 2035. At the time of the announcement, no other large automaker had set a target date for exclusively producing EVs. GM said it would invest $35 billion over the next five years to build its EV production capabilities and capacity, including the manufacture of batteries. As one management scholar stated, ""There is a huge disruption coming."" The protagonist is a prospective employee who would lead investor relations for GM, and who is interested in learning about the company's objectives, potential pitfalls, and greatest strengths. She will need to evaluate how to communicate the EV transition to stakeholders, and the GM employees are one specific audience. The case introduces opportunities to discuss labor unions, a powerful force in the US automobile industry. A variety of financial tables and graphs in the case exhibits enable instructors to focus on topics they feel are most appropriate for their individual courses.
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students are expected to learn an overwhelming amount of information in order to graduate college; however, in today's job market, it takes more than simply understanding STEM concepts to be successful. In this text, Roger Forsgren-NASA's former chief knowledge officer-offers STEM students critical lessons within four main areas: being an introvert in an extroverts' world, communication skills, critical thinking, and ethics. Each chapter acts as a practical guide and includes actionable strategies and historical case studies-some surrounding engineering topics, some not-demonstrating essential knowledge for STEM graduates as they progress in their careers. While this book is specifically written for individuals in STEM, many college graduates will find value in it regardless of their degree. Chapter 1 begins by describing a stereotypical engineer's personality: curious, extremely logical, focused, practical, and orderly. An engineer's personality is typically that of an introvert, but we live in an extrovert's world. Rather than changing their personality, engineers need to learn to adapt and temporarily transform into ambiverts in order to succeed. Ambiverts recognize that they may have to set aside their introversion at times and speak up; advice is offered on how to have your voice be heard, including practicing beforehand, making eye contact, and volunteering to speak first. Three case studies are presented. The need to speak up is demonstrated through the NASA Challenger tragedy and a project for NASA's Hypersonic Test Facility. A case focusing on Herbert Hoover is also offered along with questions and discussion points.
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students are expected to learn an overwhelming amount of information in order to graduate college; however, in today's job market, it takes more than simply understanding STEM concepts to be successful. In this text, Roger Forsgren-NASA's former chief knowledge officer-offers STEM students critical lessons within four main areas: being an introvert in an extroverts' world, communication skills, critical thinking, and ethics. Each chapter acts as a practical guide and includes actionable strategies and historical case studies-some surrounding engineering topics, some not-demonstrating essential knowledge for STEM graduates as they progress in their careers. While this book is specifically written for individuals in STEM, many college graduates will find value in it regardless of their degree. Chapter 2 discusses the importance of building communication skills. Communication skills are vital for everyone in their careers, but both old and new engineers struggle with this. Suggestions on how to write professionally are outlined, such as including a clear thesis statement, being aware of tone, and avoiding the use of pronouns. Ultimately, professional writing should be as direct and simple as possible. Tips on speechmaking and giving presentations are also offered, including being prepared but not overprepared, sharing something about yourself at the beginning, and recognizing that the audience wants you to be successful. In all communication, concision is key. The three case studies in this chapter share stories of a fire at Mann Gulch, NASA's Mars Surveyor 1998 program, and how Lee's lack of communication skills may have affected the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg.