A comprehensive review case that entails both investment and financing decisions. Students must value an acquisitions opportunity and determine how Nelson Paper ought to finance both the acquisition and its regular capital expenditures program.
Supplement to case UV2850. This case supplements the A case (UVA-M-0452) by describing events in the disposable-diaper market from June 1994 to October 1994.
Nike and Reebok, the two largest athletic footwear companies, look to contractors in Asia to manufacture their shoes. Sourcing from Asia offers advantages of low cost and flexibility, but raises questions about human rights and corporate responsibility. How Nike and Reebok have addressed these questions is the focus of this case.
The new general manager of Warner Cable's Medford, Massachusetts complex faces a number of turnaround challenges in 1985, including service deficiencies, customer complaints, high turnover, and low employee morale. By 1988 he has turned the situation around, but some employees and superiors question his turnaround style. Their concerns have broad implications for career systems at Warner. Teaching objectives include the understanding of human resource management tradeoffs in a turnaround situation, and the appropriateness of individual management styles over time as a company improves its productivity and communications.
Barilla SpA, an Italian manufacturer that sells to its retailers largely through third-party distributors, experienced widely fluctuating demand patterns from its distributors during the late 1980s. This case describes a proposal to address the problem by implementing a continuous replenishment program, under which the responsibility for determining shipment quantities to the distributors would shift from the distributors to Barilla. Describes support and resistance within Barilla's different functional areas and within the distributors Barilla approached with the proposal.
Presents a framework and a method for addressing the new product channel choice decision. Offers a six-step method that involves: 1) disaggregating and prioritizing a distribution channel by customers' channel function requirements; 2) obtaining and combining customers' (and key informants) evaluations of the channel functions; 3) benchmarking existing channels (own as well as competitors'); 4) identifying and constructing effective channel alternatives; 5) quantifying the short-term and long-term benefits and costs of each alternative; and 6) selecting the appropriate channel by trading off the opportunities versus constraints posed by existing channel networks (if applicable). The method requires extensive management participation to facilitate its implementation. Provides an illustrative application to demonstrate its managerial usefulness.
As a result of a coordinated strategy to establish Levi's as the original, premium American jean, Levi Strauss Japan K.K. has become the leader in Japan. Japan's jeans market is changing: the market is contracting, competition is increasing, and structural changes are occurring in the distribution channel. The issue for Levi is to develop a strategy for success given these changes in Japan.
S.K. Ko managed Motorola's Penang, Malaysia factory, producing telecommunications components and equipment. As a female manager of a multi-ethnic and labor-intensive plant in Asia, Ko faced a number of challenges. She had already promoted quality circles and quality competitions to meet Motorola's raised standards. Extensive training gave workers the skills to solve problems and to troubleshoot equipment. But Ko was skeptical of empowerment efforts at other Motorola sites that aimed for much greater worker participation in decision making. She thought empowerment inappropriate to the Asian context. She also thought that many operators would have trouble upgrading their skills as the world became more information intensive. Other Southeast Asian nations with lower labor costs were a competitive threat to Penang's labor-intensive processes. She envisioned Penang transformed by the year 2000 into a fully automated manufacturing operation and a design center for all of Motorola's Asian operations.
Motorola's old automative electronics plant in Arcade, outside Buffalo, New York, faced the prospect of closure in the mid-1980s, but leading customers persuaded Motorola to give the plant a second chance. The new plant manager, Dennis Fiehn, recognized that existing practices had to change if the plant was to remain competitive. He pushed for fewer supervisory layers, flexible job boundaries, cross-training, team-based production, and more active problem solving. The move to a modern plant in nearby Elma (1989) coincided with a new corporate-wide push for higher quality and cycle-time goals and more participative management. Soon operators were performing functions previously restricted to supervisors, technicians, and skilled workers. Supervisors, now team leaders, delegated more responsibility and became more like coaches. The plant was now recognized as a strong performer and slated for expansion.
Motorola became a recognized quality leader in large part by becoming a leader in employee education and by encouraging "participative management." Through the Motorola Training and Education Center, later Motorola University, the company invested substantial resources in improving workers' skills and establishing a common language of quality across the corporation to support its ambitious quality improvement goals. Through quality circles, its Total Customer Satisfaction quality competition, and its potentially more far-reaching empowerment initiative, Motorola encouraged its employees to apply their new knowledge and skills in innovative and proactive ways. The growing interest in empowerment raised a number of organizational issues that led many to wonder how best to achieve its stated goals.
Less than a year after Sealed Air embarked on a program to improve manufacturing efficiency and product quality, the company borrowed almost 90% of the market value of its common stock and paid it out as a special dividend to shareholders. Management purposefully and successfully used the leveraged recapitalization as a watershed event, creating a crisis that disrupted the status quo and promoted internal change, which included establishing a new objective, changing compensation systems, and reorganizing manufacturing and capital budgeting processes.
In mature industrial markets, segmenting customers by size, industry, or product benefits alone rarely is sufficient. Customer behavior regarding trade-offs between price and service also becomes an important criterion. This note offers a framework to enable such buying-behavior-oriented microsegmentation of industrial customers. It uses the framework to segment the national accounts of a large industrial company and show how the results of the segmentation study may be used to redirect the firm's resources and customer segments.
Traditionally, distribution channels have been viewed as vertical marketing systems where responsibility was transferred from one layer to the next, like passing a baton in a relay race. Distribution channels in the future are likely to look more like horizontal alliances of suppliers and intermediaries, all with the aim of efficiently and effectively addressing customers' real needs. These transitions, driven by an underlying change in the economics of production and distribution, are leading to distinct trends in the distribution industry. This note focuses on three primary trends: hybrid channels, multiple channels, and shorter channels. After exploring the challenges managers face as they reorient their distribution, highlights the effects of such changes on supplier-intermediary relationships.
Presents the merger negotiations between Bank of Boston (BOB) and Shawmut National Corp. (SNC), two of the country's largest bank holding companies and requires students to value BOB's current offer for SNC. Provides an overview of recent events and trends in the commercial banking industry including the rise of interstate mergers and bank failures.