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In January 2015, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Canaan Group, a privately owned logistics conglomerate of businesses in Vancouver, Canada, was considering how to capitalize on opportunities in the freight forwarding industry. The first thing he needed to do was stabilize the Export Cargo Specialist (ECS) division. The ECS division focused on ocean freight forwarding—helping customers coordinate and ship goods from origin to destination. To counter a glut of shipping capacity and fall in demand over the past few years, the CEO had restructured the roles and assignments in the division. He attempted to create a cross-trained workforce capable of performing a range of functions for clients. However, issues emerged with the restructuring, leading to employee departures and, along with the industry changes, a net loss in operations. The CEO was looking to turn things around and avoid further mistakes. He wondered if he should give his restructuring experiment more time, bring in an experienced project manager, or promote a current ECS staff member to find a solution.

BrightView Plumbing and Heating (BrightView) was founded in 1997 to provide plumbing services for both residential and commercial customers. The founder's son joined the company in 2008 and implemented a new operational strategy. However, he soon discovered problems in the process and procedures. Although he was able to apply an effective system for warehousing products internally, by 2015, the day-to-day policies and operational activities were not proving to be efficient, and the cost of goods sold was rising at a higher rate than the increase in sales. The company encountered miscommunication between the appointment scheduling (dispatching) and the availability of parts. BrightView needed to resolve the issues by analyzing the current situation and developing recommendations for improvement.

On January 3, 2011, the Canadian Competition Bureau was reviewing a recent business merger. CCS Corporation Inc. (Tervita) had acquired Complete Environmental Inc. (Complete). Prior to its acquisition by Tervita, Complete had received regulatory approval to operate a secure landfill site in Northeastern British Columbia (NEBC). However, a complaint about the purchase was filed by SECURE Energy Services Inc. (SECURE), one of Tervita’s competitors. The complaint claimed that the price Tervita paid for Complete was well above fair market value, and that the purchase would eliminate a competitor in the NEBC market. At the time, only two secure landfills operated in NEBC. Both were owned by Tervita, which provided a wide-range of waste management, recovery, and disposal services to the North American oil and gas industry. The Canadian Competition Bureau had to evaluate the economics underlying Tervita’s decision to pay a premium price for Complete. It also needed to determine whether the acquisition violated the Competition Act, or whether the complaint was merely a frivolous case of “sour grapes” stemming from SECURE’s own failure to acquire Complete.

Supplement for product 9B17M121.

In 2017, while donating blood on campus, a management science graduate student noticed that the mobile blood donor clinic set up at his university’s community centre was a congested tandem queuing system. Finding one-and-one-half hours too long for donors to wait, the student considered how the process could be reduced by at least half an hour. He needed to devise a reasonably precise model to represent the donor flow in the clinic. Using either the mode or the average service times supplied by the nurses, the student could build a relatively straightforward discrete-event simulation model to identify bottlenecks and improve the donor flow.

Instructor spreadsheet for product 8B17E010.

In August 2016, the director of UdaipurTimes.com, a hyperlocal news website, and his partner were faced with a problem. Their start-up venture had thus far grown without any explicit strategy. Despite a steady readership of nearly 200,000, achieving further revenue growth and sustained profitability were ongoing issues. UdaipurTimes.com needed to come up with a comprehensive strategy by evaluating various alternatives (such as creating a mobile app and soliciting user-generated content) to increase the frequency of customer visits and attract new readers to the website. Given its limited financial strength and its focus on speedily growing its customer base while leveraging current resources and capabilities, what strategy should UdaipurTimes.com choose?

Narayana Health, an Indian private healthcare provider, was established with the aim of providing affordable healthcare services without compromising quality. Over the years, its growth and expansion was financed by private equity investors. In August 2015, private equity investors of the company decided to go public through the offer for sale route. Private equity investors had to decide the value of the initial public offering (IPO) and whether the time was appropriate for Narayana to go public. To do so, they needed to consider the company’s financial performance, the pros and cons of the company’s strategy and business model, the industry’s future growth potential, and macroeconomic factors.

In 2016, Dalmia Bharat Cement Limited (Dalmia Cement) and its agency, the Dalmia Bharat Foundation, worked in the areas of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It worked with communities in the neighbourhoods of its plants and with rural communities in many other areas, focusing on soil and water conservation. In 2016 there was a growing concern that its water harvesting structures and methods of soil protection and improvement were no longer good enough. A measure that valued water in financial terms was required to help justify the foundation’s targets and funding. The company tasked interns from a well-known management institute with searching for such a measure.

In 2015 there was a public outcry over the price increase in Daraprim (pyrimethamine) by Turing Pharmaceuticals AG (Turing). Daraprim was a drug that was widely used by a small population of U.S. patients to treat toxoplasmosis. Soon after Turing acquired its commercialization rights in August 2015, the company increased the list price of the drug by over 5,000 per cent. The increase led to consumer protests in the United States, and the media vehemently condemned Turing’s action of raising the price for the decades-old drug that had gone off-patent in 1970. Later, the U.S. Congress stepped in, demanding that Turing’s officials clarify how they could justify the high price of Daraprim. How should Turing respond to the public outcry? Should Turing stand by the increased price for Daraprim? How could it handle the outcry from the patient groups that needed Daraprim?

In September 2016, Loblaw Companies Limited (Loblaw), Canada’s largest grocery retailer, was facing disappointing financial results, with net income in the previous quarter down 14.6 per cent from 2015. The chairman of Loblaw, needed to evaluate how to move forward in an increasingly competitive industry. With Sobeys Inc. at a close second to Loblaw’s market share and with food inflation significantly affecting the prices of produce, the chairman needed to consider how to approach the grocery retail industry using a method that would appease both his frequently price-sensitive consumers and his bottom line.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B17M165.

Presentation for product 8B17M167.

In early 2012, the chair of the board of directors of Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) had to determine how to respond to demands made by the company’s largest shareholder, Pershing Square Capital Management (Pershing), an activist hedge fund. Pershing’s chief executive officer (CEO) claimed that CP was underperforming, and expressed his desire to replace two board members and appoint a new CEO. The chair of the board of directors had to determine the best means to fight the proxy battle and serve the interests of shareholders. Pershing was not likely to back down easily. With a shareholders’ meeting expected to occur in the next few months, the chair had to resolve the matter quickly. Because shareholder activism was relatively new in Canada, the outcome of this conflict would send a message to other activists interested in Canadian organizations.

Supplement for product 9B17M134.

Supplement for product 9B17M0134.

In 2017, Ivey Publishing, a publisher and distributor of cases for the academic market, struggled with widespread copyright infringement, which affected its revenue stream. The digital revolution, which had an impact on so many other creative industries, including music, film, and computer software, had also affected the publisher.<br><br>Ivey Publishing’s sales team leader made a call to a business professor to elicit his support in encouraging his students to purchase cases from Ivey Publishing (rather than copying them from other students). Having failed to persuade this professor and others, the sales team leader reflected on what else she could do to strengthen Ivey Publishing’s financial performance.

In 2016, the founder and chief executive officer of Red Star Macalline, China’s largest furniture shopping mall operator, was finalizing the company’s new growth plan—the “1001 Strategy.” The plan was to be implemented in two phases: first, building 1,000 brick-and-mortar shopping malls, focused on home improvement products, and then integrating the malls into a seamless ecosystem through a single overarching Internet platform. The company faced challenges in being the first in the Chinese home improvement industry to forge such a path. Could the chief executive officer sustain the company’s first-mover advantage? Would his overall strategy work? Did he need a reality check for the execution plan?

In June 2016, the augmented reality game Pokémon GO quickly became one of the hottest topics in the world, changing both the online and offline behaviours of players. Pokémon GO was jointly developed by the San Francisco-based firm Niantic Inc. and The Pokémon Company, based in Japan, and was underwritten by the Japanese video game giant Nintendo. The game, which overlaid virtual items and creatures onto the physical world, allowed smartphone users to seek out and capture a variety of virtual monsters in real-world locations. With easy-to-follow game rules, Pokémon GO rapidly picked up a wide range of players and, within a relatively short period of time, generated considerable income through in-app purchases. The sudden popularity (and the eventual decline in interest) of the new game provoked debates about the technology behind it. How could developers use augmented reality technology to satisfy customer needs, address business challenges, and promote social welfare?

AquaSafi Purification Systems Pvt. Ltd. (AquaSafi) was a social enterprise that aimed to provide clean water to people in the developing world. The organization assembled and sold its water purification technology, at cost, to villages and non-governmental organizations in rural India. Before deciding to change AquaSafi’s current operating model, the executive director thought it would be useful to perform a cost/benefit analysis to see how the company’s cash flow would differ at a new water filtration plant under the current and proposed operating models. He also wondered whether it made sense for AquaSafi to change its operating model as it expanded its operations, since the company’s current operating model had been well received in the villages.