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The president of Vic Progressive Diamond Drilling, a Canadian enterprise based in Sussex, New Brunswick that provides products and services to mining companies, is reviewing the progress in the market launch of SkyTrack, a new product designed for use in difficult terrain exploration by large mining corporations. Feedback during field trials has been favourable; the innovation is, in fact, customer-led. There is also evidence that this multipurpose vehicle saves time and money in transporting mining equipment across rough terrain in remote areas. But the company has yet to make its first sale in two years because the user community is experiencing a difficult economic environment and is unwilling to make capital investments. How can product adoption be generated? What customer value proposition can be developed? Can SkyTrack be positioned as a means to improve cash flow for customers during difficult times, or should customers be primed to adopt it when the inevitable uptick in exploration occurs?

The director of CPVet in Gurgaon, India, was worried. The cost of running the veterinary clinics was mounting. Was customer behaviour in India with respect to pets changing? Unlike in many developed countries, Indian pet owners were not as willing to think of their pets as their own children and care for them accordingly. However, the industry seemed to be changing and trends showed that spending on pet care was steadily increasing. Were pet owners in India ready to invest more in their pets? Should CPVet expand beyond Gurgaon? Despite the fast growth rate of the industry and the company’s first-mover advantage, CPVet faced several challenges with respect to its goal of expanding to a national level.

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The owner and chief executive officer of the India Holiday Bureau (IHB), was besieged by calls from irate travelers seeking an explanation for the poor customer service they had received. It was the peak of the tourist season in India, with international visitors pouring into the country to explore its temples, palaces, hills, beaches and wildlife reserves. IHB had accepted several online hotel-booking requests, but because the hotel did not have sufficient staff to follow through on these requests, several customers were left stranded at the airport without their promised airport transfers. Others had been forced to go without hotel rooms altogether. IHB knew that a lack of accurate forecasting and proper planning was at the root of this problem. How could the owner accurately predict the growth that would continue to overwhelm IHB unless the company prepared for it?

The equity analyst for a large investment bank is in the process of evaluating a potential takeover of Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada’s largest drugstore retailer, by Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada’s largest grocery retailer. Rumours of the takeover have been circulating for some time, and the analyst wants to provide her buy-side clients with both her comments on the proposed transaction and her assessment of a reasonable offering price.

In December 2012, the senior management team of Whole Foods Market Inc. was contemplating the company’s options for international expansion, including further expansion in Canada. The company, headquartered in Austin, Texas, was a natural and organic foods supermarket that had become known and trademarked as “America’s Healthiest Grocery Store.” It had seen steep growth since its inception in 1977 and had an appetite for more. Ten years ago, its first Canadian store was opened in Toronto, followed by three more stores in Ontario and four in British Columbia. Was it time to expand deeper now and, if yes, into which provinces? It would be interesting to expand into Quebec with a store location in Montreal, but that province had a strong union presence, which was inconsistent with the company’s culture. Also unclear was which management team should be running an extensive Canadian operation. Should the current U.S. team facilitate the expansion, or should a Canadian management team be developed? A systematic approach to assessing the options was needed.

Cisco Systems, Inc., the dominant global supplier of the routers and switches that formed the backbone of the Internet, was considering entry into the cloud-based education market in China through the design and marketing of an in-classroom device, the Sunbird. The new vice-president and chief technology officer of Enterprise Networking Group, Cisco Greater China, had met with a Politburo member of the Communist Party of China and State Councilor with responsibilities including China’s science, technology and education policies. The vice-president had introduced Cisco’s global operations and the two women had discussed partnering, technology transfer, cross branding, joint product and service development, cooperation with Chinese companies, and the IT revolution and its effect on Chinese education. How could Cisco profitably join in the Chinese education IT revolution? Cisco had never entered the educational IT equipment space in any part of the world with its own dedicated product. Should it develop the Sunbird for the Chinese market?<br><br> A <a href=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa9uTc1JKDI>video is available for viewing online.

In early 2011, the founder of REfficient, an asset recovery service based in Hamilton, Ontario, was thinking about how she should manage the rapid growth that seemed just around the corner. Founded in 2010 to help cable firms generate value from their stock of surplus equipment, REfficient, with no direct competitors in the Ontario market, had grown rapidly and had a list of corporate customers, two warehouses and five employees. The company was positioned as the efficient way for customers to recover value from their surplus assets; it would collect and inventory them, provide an online list and track the environmental impact of selling or discarding them. The company was now looking to secure a pilot project with the Ontario provincial government. Innovative in the “green” sense because of its innovative reuse, recycle or resell model, as well as its integrated carbon footprint estimator, REfficient was a good match for the program. But how would it deal with an increasingly large variety of items, given its limited resources and space?

After several years of near steady state, the market share of Colgate Palmolive Canada Inc. in the toothpaste category has gathered momentum in 2012. In a bid to extend the gap between the company and its primary competitors in the category in 2013, the vice-president of customer development is discussing the options with his team at company headquarters in Toronto. Market share is an important performance metric at the company. One suggestion is to increase the marketing budget. There is a general consensus that marketing dollars should not be diffused across activities during the year, but there are differences of opinion about what to focus on — trade promotions, consumer promotions or advertising — in order to sustain the momentum in market share in 2013.

Global consumption of petroleum products stood at just more than 90 million barrels per day by the end of 2013, and was expected to increase to 91 million or more by the end of 2014. Petroleum companies were constantly exploring the planet for new oil reserves to meet this voracious demand for fossil fuels. Because three-quarters of the earth was water, it was evident that these oil reserves were largely underwater; however, until the end of 2013, very few players had explored this opportunity. Although reaching deep-water drilling sites posed various challenges — environmental, political, technological, etc. — offshore exploration was the future of the oil and gas industry.<br><br>Because of its very successful campaigns, Cairn India was ideally positioned for offshore exploration. Capturing and capitalizing on the opportunity of offshore exploration would give it an edge, but the question remained: Would it be better to gain the prime mover advantage or wait for other players to start the process so that it could learn from others’ mistakes and reap benefits later?

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A homeowner and his family finally have an offer on their residence. The terms negotiated with the buyers require the homeowner to build a detached garage on the property before the closing date on August 30, 2013, which is in 16 weeks. The homeowner’s family has also made a conditional offer on another home, and the condition must be removed in two days if they would like to finalize that purchase. Although proficient at construction, the homeowner has encountered a major addition to his timeline on May 1. The city is requiring that he obtain a variance approval before the building department issues the building permit, thereby delaying the start of construction by between nine and ten weeks. The homeowner must decide whether to go ahead or cancel the sale of the residence and the purchase of a new home.

Kingfisher Airlines, a leading airline company in India, had incurred substantial losses and its net worth had been eroded. This news was widely covered by Indian and international press. Analysts and media were of the opinion that Kingfisher needed equity infusion to steer it through the distress. Because of its financial difficulties, the company’s stock was trading at near historic lows and its equity value was, in fact, negative. Yet company management was emphatic that Kingfisher was on the road to recovery although it was negotiating a second debt restructuring with banks. Would this restructuring prove more successful than the last? Could anything save Kingfisher from this dire financial situation?

A university instructor mulls over the idea of partnering with six of his students to start a new business that would provide all-in-one starter kits for first-year university or college students moving into residences across Canada. To help with his decision-making process, the instructor wants to evaluate the product and the group’s marketing strategy; he also wants to project the new venture’s financial performance for the first three years of operations.

Trionym Systems, a designer and manufacturer of 3-D printers, was enjoying soaring sales. Trionym’s chief executive officer (CEO) presented a plan for acquiring a new production facility to address the expected demand for the firm’s latest 3-D printer, the RB-5000, which was presently under beta testing. He expressed reservations with respect to considerable uncertainty both in terms of market size and production costs. Accordingly, he wished to use the latest prescriptive analytics techniques to ensure that the decision to expand was the right one. The chief analytics officer was tasked with assessing the proposed project and had to report his findings at the next board meeting.

For French watchmaker Pequignet, its return to the annual luxury watch and jewelry show, Baselworld, signaled a new page in the company’s 40-year history. As the only “haute horlogerie” manufacturer in France since the quartz crisis in the 1970s, Pequignet had caught the attention of both the media and the watch collector community, despite going through receivership and a change of ownership. In addition to showcasing its Calibre Royal collection, Pequignet presented a new line of entry-level watches. Should the company invest further in its manufacturing processes to make high-end mechanical watches, as it had in the past? Or should it focus on producing more affordable, accessible products, as with its most recent collection? As an independent atelier, Pequignet had to address these questions in order to succeed in the highly competitive global watch market.

On June 6, 2014, the deputy general manager of the human resources department of Xiamen Airlines, based in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, discussed his company’s best practices at China's first national forum on aviation security. Since 2009, a significant reform in the company’s pilot compensation system had aimed to promote a stronger linkage between their pay and performance. Initial outcomes had been positive, with improved productivity and job satisfaction. Yet, there were ongoing challenges in recruiting and retaining pilots due to increasing shortages of qualified personnel in the domestic and global aviation labour market and greater competition from both state-owned and new private airline companies in China. How could Xiamen Airlines become an employer of choice? Was the high compensation sustainable if the industry became less profitable? What else could the company offer to retain talented pilots?