Rick Cohen, president and CEO of C&S Wholesale Grocers, is trying to decide whether and how to implement the self-managed teams concept in his warehouse. Eight months earlier, C&S had begun to act as principal wholesaler to A&P throughout New England, a decision that was consistent with the firm's growth strategy, but that also represented a significant increase in daily throughput. Cohen was concerned about whether the company's existing operations would be able to meet the needs of all its customers and maintain the high levels of customer satisfaction for which the company was known throughout New England. When implemented successfully, the self-managed teams concept had been credited with enhancing an organization's productivity and competitiveness. Cohen wondered how such a concept could be implemented in the context of a labor-intensive, unionized warehouse environment.
A new political appointee with years of volunteer experience takes over a highly responsible job in the state government and is met with bureaucratic inertia. Describes a successful strategy to overcome organizational resistance to change.
Briefly summarizes the process that venture capitalists use to analyze high-risk, long-term investments. Contains information on methods that can be used to calculate valuation, share price, percent ownership, implied valuation, dilution, and option pools.
TradeCard Inc. is a New York-based financial supply chain service provider focused on serving importers and exporters. Its product--TradeCard--aligns the documentary and financial requirements of a domestic or international trade transaction with the physical movement of goods. TradeCard launched its product in Hong Kong then moved on to open representative offices in Asia. In November 2002, TradeCard Inc. decided to enter China. Not only is China considered to be the biggest market in the world but most of TradeCard's biggest customers in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have their products manufactured in mainland China. With China's accession to the WTO, foreign companies, including TradeCard Inc., are eyeing China as a very promising market. However, China has yet to develop its legal, financial, and technological infrastructure to accommodate international players. Discusses how a structured B2B online payment system such as TradeCard can be marketed in China and how TradeCard Inc. can create a critical mass of users in China.
The primary purpose of this case is to provide students with an opportunity to practice the implementation of a simple activity-based costing (ABC) system. In doing so, students are asked to review several possible allocation bases and ascertain the best base by which to allocate plant administration costs. In addition, students are expected to calculate and compare traditional volume-based or direct-labor plus direct materials-based overhead allocation results with ABC--and then analyze which allocation method is most appropriate to the situation at Zauner Ornaments. This case also allows students to apply a managerial perspective and utilize the cost allocation results to identify potential pricing and cost management strategies.
This case has three main purposes: 1. To illustrate the importance of understanding cost behaviors in calculating the contribution of the Corvallis Cup youth soccer tournament to decide whether to continue, drop, or expand the tournament. 2. To provide a vehicle for discussing sunk costs, overhead allocation methods, and the impact of misallocation on the income/loss shown for a segment of an organization. 3. To allow students to perform simple breakeven analysis using relevant costs.
In October 2002, the senior investment officers of UBS AG's Global Asset Management (GAM) division, the largest asset management firm in the world, must decide whether to issue a new quantitative investment product, one that will stand in sharp contrast to GAM's historically fundamentalist and value-style approach. The problem raises sharp questions about the strategic evolution of the industry, its products, and in particular, its leading firms. To some in the firm, it seemed that the new "quant" product was a natural extension of the strategic transformation of GAM since 1995. But others in the senior team wondered whether the market would be ready for this product. The tasks for the student are to map the industry changes, evaluate the transformation of UBS, and assess the fit of the new quant product with the firm's strategic approach. This case was prepared to meet the following teaching objectives: 1) Assess the pace, direction, and implications of globalization of the asset management industry. Key to this assessment is the emerging research on the relative importance of countries versus sectors in explaining investment returns globally; 2) Explore a "country/sector" organization structure for global research; Identify its defining characteristics. Compare it with other possible structures. Determine its advantages and disadvantages as an organizing system. Identify key success drivers. And 3) Evaluate a quantitative investment product relative to other product offerings.
Examines the efforts of an early-stage venture capital firm to formalize processes and build a pyramidal organization in an industry dominated by informal, unpyramidal structures.
Provides a history of the board of directors of the Coca-Cola Co. through 2003. Describes the evolution in the board's membership, practices, and structure and the role it played in the company's governance. Questions are raised about the relationship between the board and top management, especially how the board is carrying out its responsibilities in the 21st century.
Excel spreadsheet for frontier analysis. Requires built in macro. Suggested fix prepared by a student is also available (product 7B01N08) should also be used as there is no guarantee the software will work.
To be used with Excel spreadsheet (5B01N08), due to the spreadsheets reliance on a built-in macro, the program may not work properly depending on the system used. This list of fixes may help in correcting some of the problems.
Popular stereotypes of lawyers include "overhead," "Dr. No," "internal cop," "keep us out of trouble!" and "get us out of trouble!" Focus groups of business leaders queried in a survey by the Case Western Reserve University Law School associated the word "lawyer" with "authoritative," "conservative," "arrogant," "intimidating," and "know-it-all." Yet, managers who view counsel as a necessary evil miss opportunities to work with attorneys as partners to increase and capture value and to manage risk.
Explains the difference between civil law and common law systems and explores the role of precedent in a common law jurisdiction, such as the United States. Includes extensive excerpts from both the majority and the dissenting opinions in Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court overruled its prior decision in Bowers and struck down a state statute banning certain intimate sexual conduct between homosexuals.
This note provides an introduction to the First Year Operations course in the Darden MBA program. The course is taught over 36 class sessions spanning two quarters. The note provides an introduction to operations management, why it is important, and what will be covered in this core course. The course is designed to provide students with a fundamental understanding of operations management and a perspective that will enable them to leverage their knowledge of operations to improve their managerial performance.
Describes events associated with Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's intelligence chief and advisor to President Fujimori, his network, and interventions in affairs of the Newmont Mining Corp. Newmont, a U.S. company established in 1921, proclaimed its corporate values to be "behaving with integrity, working loyally, inspiring trust, telling the truth, caring for our colleagues and cooperating with our community." Yet, on February 26, 1998, Lawrence T. Kurlander, a vice president of Newmont, met with Vladimiro Montesinos Torres in Montesinos' office at the Servicio de Intelligencia Nacional (the national intelligence service) to seek his help in getting a resolution favorable to Newmont in a quarrel with the French company Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres (BRGM) over their shared ownership of the Yanacocha mine. The mine was the richest gold mine in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world. BRGM wanted to sell part of its 25% share in Yanacocha to Normandy Ltd., an Australian mining company. Newmont sued to block the sale and to gain control of the mine for itself. The dispute had made its way to the Supreme Court of Peru. Montesinos secretly taped his conversation with Kurlander, as was his habit, and the tapes provide a rare inside view of how business gets done where the rule of law is subordinated to political influence.