Interline Brands, a leading distributor of residential housing maintenance and repair parts and equipment in the U.S., had just held its November 2014 board meeting. The meeting had been productive, but not without some soul searching for both the company's management team and financial sponsors. Was now the right time to start a sale process? In particular, the team wondered whether the capital markets would cooperate and how effectively the management and sponsor teams would execute. Moreover, the company had only been private for two years, and the value creation plan was only halfway through completion. While there was much to be done at Interline, the company had performed well and was gaining momentum. Interline was a rare asset in terms of the scale it had reached. However, there were still unknowns. Would buyers reward Interline with a high valuation multiple that reflected its acceleration in organic growth? Would financing markets remain healthy? Would such a process disrupt Interline's customers and employees?
The objective of this Reading is to enhance understanding of basic business transactions and their impact on the financial position of a business. With a focus on the balance sheet, this Reading defines assets, liabilities, and stockholders' equity and utilizes the accounting equation to help think through the processing of everyday business transactions. Transaction analysis is presented, not to teach readers to become bookkeepers, but rather to help them understand how these economic events affect the balance sheet. This Reading includes one Interactive Illustration, which introduces a graphical representation of the Balance Sheet. Readers select from a list of possible transactions, and observe the effects on the Balance Sheet. This Reading also includes a short video, which centers around an interview of the owner of the small business (Ashmont Cycles) that is referred to as a running example through the reading.
The objective of this reading is to enhance understanding of basic business transactions and their impact on the operations of a business. The reading's focus is on the statement of income and the statement of cash flows, two critical financial statements that are based on a concept of flow. The statement of retained earnings is also introduced in this reading.
Bollore Logistics Canada is an international freight forwarder based in Saint-Laurent, Quebec and part of the transportation and logistics division of the Bollore Group, a French multinational headed by the Bollore family. Freight forwarders provide their clients with transport solutions by coordinating the modes of transportation used, customs clearance and documentation, port handling, and supervision of all shipping aspects. This case features Marc Gagnon, a new recruit in the sea freight export department of Bollore Logistics Canada, who has to respond to calls from three clients. The three have asked about different shipments and transactions (transport of mining equipment to New Caledonia, pharmaceutical products to Chile, and circus show materials to Greece). Each client request involves international maritime shipping calling for the choice of a specific Incoterm (version 2020, as defined by the International Chamber of Commerce) and the corresponding estimate. For each of the three situations, the characteristics of the buyer and seller are described, along with their respective business objectives, their relationship, the merchandise and the destination. The three cases are presented in increasing order of difficulty.
New research conducted with restaurant listings on Yelp found that establishments given prime position atop search results did get better results. Still, there's an important caveat. "The value Yelp ads seem to provide is in surfacing brands to customers," the researchers point out. That isn't to say that well-known companies should never use search ads; however, they should bear in mind that the ads work best when alerting customers to aspects of the brand that they're not already aware of.
When researchers compared daily data from the S&P 500 index with daily environmental data from Lower Manhattan, they discovered a connection between poor air quality and diminished stock performance.
The case deals with the value chain of soya and red gram, from the farm to the market. The activities are conducted through the system of cooperatives focused around the Adilabad district in Andhra Pradesh, India. The organization providing the necessary support and training to the cooperatives is Centre for Collective Development (CCD) which was set up in 2004. The case specifically deals with operations in Adilabad where CCD has helped 765 farmers trade 535.6 tons of soybean (2013-14) through the ''pool, store and sell'' business model. This number has reduced, though to 520 farmers trading 314.7 tons in 2014-2015. The case describes the circumstances leading to the same. The key decisions to be made are whether the said co-operative should proceed to invest in forward integration (processing and/or branding) in soybean processing. This becomes particularly important in Adilabad region because, while global soy meal demand appears to be on the surge, soy meal (derived from soybean agricultural output) production and hence exports seem to be decreasing, after a peak.
Set in early 2009, Part (A) of the case describes the operational challenges faced by a growing subsidiary firm of a global auto major, in an emerging economy. The case illustrates how India emerges as a key market and the Indian subsidiary evolves into a material management and logistics (MM&L) hub for its Asia Pacific and Africa (APA) region. As the volumes of APA region begin to increase, the parent company realizes the need to automate material planning and scheduling-related processes across the plants in the APA region, which were being managed manually. The company takes this opportunity to virtually integrate the entire supply chain across all the plants in the APA region, by linking sales planning, material planning, procurement, production scheduling, and delivery activities, through a common order-to-delivery (OTD) system for the APA region. The Indian subsidiary in the meantime decides to introduce a small car, specifically engineered to meet the requirements of a high-volume, but price-sensitive Indian market. The case then focuses on the challenges the APA MM&L team faces in implementing the OTD system, for the first time in India plant (to be followed by plants in Australia, South Africa, China, and Thailand), replacing the existing built-to-stock (BTS) model. Part (A) of the case ends by unfolding the age-old tension between the upstream material planning and scheduling activities and the downstream marketing and distribution networks. The various stakeholders in the system are left to grapple with these challenges before they can arrive at a consensus regarding "if and how to implement" the OTD system in order to enjoy the benefits of automation and virtual integration. Case (B) describes the outcomes of the actual implementation and provides scope for investigating the impact of OTD on the success of the small car introduced in the Indian market.
Supplement to case IMB615. Set in early 2009, Part (A) of the case describes the operational challenges faced by a growing subsidiary firm of a global auto major, in an emerging economy. The case illustrates how India emerges as a key market and the Indian subsidiary evolves into a material management and logistics (MM&L) hub for its Asia Pacific and Africa (APA) region. As the volumes of APA region begin to increase, the parent company realizes the need to automate material planning and scheduling-related processes across the plants in the APA region, which were being managed manually. The company takes this opportunity to virtually integrate the entire supply chain across all the plants in the APA region, by linking sales planning, material planning, procurement, production scheduling, and delivery activities, through a common order-to-delivery (OTD) system for the APA region. The Indian subsidiary in the meantime decides to introduce a small car, specifically engineered to meet the requirements of a high-volume, but price-sensitive Indian market. The case then focuses on the challenges the APA MM&L team faces in implementing the OTD system, for the first time in India plant (to be followed by plants in Australia, South Africa, China, and Thailand), replacing the existing built-to-stock (BTS) model. Part (A) of the case ends by unfolding the age-old tension between the upstream material planning and scheduling activities and the downstream marketing and distribution networks. The various stakeholders in the system are left to grapple with these challenges before they can arrive at a consensus regarding "if and how to implement" the OTD system in order to enjoy the benefits of automation and virtual integration. Case (B) describes the outcomes of the actual implementation and provides scope for investigating the impact of OTD on the success of the small car introduced in the Indian market.
The case provides a setting in which students can understand the relationship between inventory valuation, cost of goods sold and the gross margin. The inventory accounting policy choice that a company makes would have a direct impact on the company's profitability and its balance sheet. Changes in accounting policy will impact the current performance as well as the future performance. The company in this case changed its valuation of gold from weighted average method to first-in first-out (FIFO) method. Additionally, the case also analyses the relation between hedge accounting and inventory.
VMW is a leader in software virtualization with approximately USD 6.5 billion annual revenue. VMW sells Workstation that can be bought online (store.vmware.com) and is used for running Mac on Windows. Workstation forms a significant portion of store revenues and most of it is bought online. There is rich digital/clickstream data for the visitors which can be combined with their past purchase history and other offline features as well. The business would like to increase sales of the product by targeting the right customers and needs a propensity model to be built using machine learning that can target the right set of customers. Michael Butler, the WW head of the store wants to leverage Parag's data sciences team to help him target the right workstation prospects that visit the store. A business conversation between Michael and Parag is followed by a technical discussion between Ravi, the data scientist and Parag. The following are the key questions that Ravi seeks to answer: -Cross-validation and evaluation in the context of huge imbalance in the data -Feature selection techniques -Communicating internal results such as lift curves back to the business -Different modeling approaches that can be followed -Interpreting the results for business decision making
VMware (VMW) is a listed software company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California selling products in the Software Defined Data Center that supports multiple devices, apps, and cloud to create an enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure. The company exclusively caters to business customers, that is, in the B2B environment. The company is characterized by 100% digital supply chain which implies that all products are downloadable from the website (www.vmware.com). The company also promotes these products online. Varied individuals across companies worldwide visit the site to familiarize themselves with the products and their features before making a decisive purchase. Along with the overview and use of the product, there are various customer-interaction triggers or ''digital assets'' that are shown to the VMW audience. These include triggers such as hands-on-learning, seminar/webinar registration, downloads, etc. Kiran R, the Director of the Data Science & Analytics team at VMW wants to know the optimal order of digital actions to be pushed towards customers to engage them effectively. Kiran's team has a rich source of online and offline available to model user's response to each of these digital assets. Kiran realized that the data is highly imbalanced and hence should be handled carefully. They wish to come up with a multinomial classification model for this purpose. Kiran decided that the model should fulfil the following objectives: 1. Determine the right order of digital assets to display to an individual e-mail id. 2. Since the website would like to target groups of e-mail ids, come up with a set of segment rules to identify top individuals for a digital asset and to target them with personalization on the website. 3. Have substantiated marketing and sales implications.
SATTVA eTECH is an electronics company involved in design and development of embedded new products. The senior manager of the company is working on the planning and execution of a defense project. Further, the manager is also evaluating the various alternative strategies to tackle uncertainties in the project network.
Managed word-of-mouth and viral marketing have emerged as one of the biggest trends of the decade. Every brand, big or small, wants its content to go viral. The backbone of successful campaigns is not limited to content or influencers who can make the message go viral. Marketers need to think of value creation at every stage. Jiten Gajaria, the convener of the social media cell of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Maharashtra, implemented a marketing transformation program for his political party while campaigning for the 13th Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Election. He gained consumer insights, calibrated market segments, devised communication strategy, recruited and managed human resources, designed campaign implementation process and developed capabilities to execute it. The case details how Gajaria rolled out a successful influencer marketing program to create WOM communication on WhatsApp. It can serve as a classic example of devising a cost-effective customer outreach program where total marketing expense was reduced by about 199%.
In this article, we consider crowdsourcing from the consumer perspective. Specifically, we examine the identity value (i.e., sense of self) that consumers accrue by participating in creative crowds. How can managers structure crowdsourcing initiatives to maximize value for participants through identity creation and expression? We strive to answer this question first by examining the different types of crowdsourcing initiatives from a value co-creation perspective. Then, we evaluate how consumers construct identities through consumption and review the literature on identity theory. Finally, we link the identity type-personal, extended, or social-to the management of crowdsourcing ventures and offer suggestions for practitioners.
Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However, such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members' diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts.
Crowdfunding is attractive to startups as an alternative funding source and offers nonmonetary resources through organizational learning. It encompasses the outsourcing of an organizational function, through IT, to a strategically defined network of actors (i.e., the crowd) in the form of an open call-specifically, requesting monetary contributions toward a commercial or social business goal. Nonetheless, many startups are hesitant to consider crowdfunding because little guidance exists on how the various types of crowdfunding add value in different life cycle stages and which type is best suited for which stage. In response to this gap, this article introduces a typology of crowdfunding, the benefits it offers, and how specific benefits relate to the identified crowdfunding types. On this basis, we present a framework for choosing the right crowdfunding type for each stage in the startup life cycle, in addition to providing practical advice on crowdfunding best practices. The best practices outlined have shown demonstrable contributions toward achieving funding goals and are likely to prove valuable for startups.
Websites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter have attracted much attention for their ability to enable organizations and individuals to raise funds from ordinary people, who contribute for a number of reasons. This phenomenon is called crowdfunding. Crowdfunding permits organizations and individuals to obtain investments they otherwise might not receive from more traditional sources such as banks, angel investors, and stock markets. A number of now well-known startups had their origins in crowdfunding. More recently, established organizations have begun to use crowdfunding websites not only as a source of finance, but also as marketing platforms. In this way, they have been able to ensure a ready market for their new offerings, with full sales pipelines, and to use the platforms as vehicles to boost brand image and gain support for brand-related causes. This adaptation of crowdfunding for marketing purposes is not without its problems, however, and organizations would be well advised to consider not only the opportunities these platforms provide, but also their limitations and risks.
The benefits provided by employment and identified with a specific employing company are referred to as employer branding. We argue that when employees use IT to transmit employer branding-sharing and accessing work-related experiences openly across organizations-their expectations and assessments of workplaces change. We collected 38,000 reviews of the highest and lowest ranked employers on Glassdoor, an online crowdsourced employer branding platform. Using IBM Watson to analyze the data, we identify seven employer branding value propositions that current, former, and potential employees care about when they collectively evaluate employers. These propositions include (1) social elements of work, (2) interest and challenge raised by work tasks, (3) the extent to which skills can be applied in meaningful ways, (4) opportunities for professional development, (5) economic issues tied to compensation, (6) the role of management, and (7) work/life balance. We clarify that these value propositions do not all matter to the same extent, and demonstrate how their relative valences and weights differ across organizations, especially if institutions are considered particularly good or bad places to work. Based on these findings, we show how employers can use crowdsourced employer branding intelligence to become exceptional workplaces that attract highly qualified employees.