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The superintendent of the St. Thomas Golf Course had to develop the 2010 operating budget for the maintenance of the golf course and recommend the extent of infrastructure expenditures for the upcoming year. The course was facing increased labour costs due to recent government-mandated increases in the minimum wage. The recommendations had to be made in terms of a weak economy in the area and a recent decline in membership. The student must first assess the financial position of the course prior to determining the extent to which discretionary expenditures should be recommended. The case requires the development of an operating budget and permits a discussion of follow-up procedures for monitoring the budget.

This supplement to Maple Leaf Foods, Inc. (A): The Listeriosis Crisis describes what the company and its chief executive officer did to cope with this crisis in the days and months following.

It was early 2010, and the Twitter Trio, the founders of Twitter, were faced with a changing market situation and pressures to make money. Twitter was a free service that had been operating without a viable business plan since 2006. In early 2010, Twitter was still not making enough money and it was time that Twitter showed a real return on investment. The Trio had to decide on a business model that was competitive. There was a data-mining project that could bring all the funds Twitter needed to stay in business, make profit, and compete with others. However, the founders were concerned that this project might be perceived to intrude on users’ privacy, even in a company that was founded on the basis of sharing information publicly.

This case identifies the approach taken by Partners HealthCare to better manage the commercialization of its intellectual property (IP). Existing processes did not leverage the shared resources, such as business development efforts and the research centres created as a consequence of the formation of Partners HealthCare in 1995. Partners was the largest hospital organization and second-largest non-university recipient of research funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH). As such, it generated a vast and varied body of IP constituting an asset of considerable value to Partners and those it served. The leadership of Partners viewed it as their mission to the organization and to the greater health care community to vigorously pursue commercializing innovation generated through research efforts. <br><br>The case considers the organizational structure and how this structure enabled a cohesive commercialization effort. It includes three vignettes that involve research projects that precede the creation of the Research, Ventures and Licensing (RVL) unit in 2005. RVL served as the centralized office for overseeing the processes of IP protection, licensing, translational research project funding, new venture creation, and industry partnerships to bring forward the inventions that emerged from the research of Partners affiliates and their primary investigators. The case demonstrates how a large health care organization can bring innovative products and services to market through appropriate organizational transformation.

Ornge’s management team is taking a look at its helicopter service contract, which accounts for 42 per cent of its annual costs. The firm is a not-for-profit organization tasked with providing air and ground ambulance services for Ontario, Canada. In the past, Ornge has subcontracted helicopter service to a service provider. But an analysis conducted within Ornge suggests that owning the helicopters might save the firm a lot of money. Any savings could be reinvested, allowing Ornge to respond to more service calls per year. There are benefits and drawbacks to each of the options facing Ornge, and Dr. Christopher Massa and his team are trying to determine which option makes the most sense for the firm.

Excel spreadsheet for 9B03E005.

A young man in India follows his passion through to near-bankruptcy. Equipped with an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, he avoids a high-paying corporate job and instead starts a stockbroking firm. After ups and downs in several businesses, he finally decides his real fulfilment will come from producing a full-length movie — Ashta Chamma, based on the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Ernest. The case chronicles the various issues he faces: funding the production, choosing the director, choosing a story that will satisfy his requirement of family entertainment, casting the principal characters, and creating a team that can bring the production to the movie theatres. The case goes behind the scenes of the film world in Tollywood, the Teluga film industry in Andhra Pradesh, and highlights the pressures faced by an entrepreneur in the industry. A rare combination of creativity, professionalism, and good business sense bring about success for the entrepreneur. Part B of the case presents the outcome after the release of the movie.

This supplement to Ashta Chamma — The Biggest Small Movie Ever Made (A) presents the outcome after the movie’s release.

This is a supplement to Tata Steel Limited: Convertible Alternative Reference Securities (A). Tata Steel’s launch of a convertible bond offering in exchange for its convertible alternative reference securities issued in 2007 was in response to shifts in environmental factors. An analysis of the offer allows for a valuation exercise and an assessment of a capital restructuring decision that considers the interests of the issuer and of the investors.

A successful Canadian road construction and maintenance company is contemplating U.S. market entry via a subsidiary in Texas. The case deals with market entry considerations: speed of entry, the need to invest in learning about a market, and the importance of staying focused on what is a reasonable, original strategy.

This is a supplement to Currie Road Construction Limited (A). Having operated for two years in the Texas market, the company is confronting a variety of difficulties. The case looks at the organization issues of reporting relationships, control systems, and staffing.

Sam Silver, a law student, was near the end of a second visit to Mason & Klump LLP, a Bay Street law firm in Toronto, Canada. He was meeting Chuck Clayton, director of professional development. Silver was mentally exhausted from the interview process that had consumed much of his past three months, during which he had been seeking a position as a summer student at Bay Street firms. He had narrowed his selection to two leading national firms, Andrews, Mantle & Smithers LLP and Mason & Klump. On November 1 and 2, Silver had had interviews at six Bay Street firms, including his top two choices. Although he believed his first choice, Andrews, Mantle & Smithers, would offer him a position on November 3, when formal offers would be made, he was not certain that the firm would do so. As the meeting drew to a close, Clayton left the room for a minute, giving Silver a short time to decide if he should ask any more questions and to begin to reflect on the interview process.

An Excel macro is a series of commands that can perform certain tasks automatically, such as obtaining data from another Excel file or the web, updating computations, generating reports, and running models. Macros can save time, reduce user errors, and complete tasks that would be extremely difficult for a user to do otherwise. This note uses examples and screenshots to introduce macros and macro recording in Microsoft Excel.

The web query feature of Microsoft Excel can be a great help in retrieving data from the web. A web query can be set up in Excel in a similar way to browsing a web page. In this note, historical stock prices are obtained from the web for use in Microsoft Excel, and a macro recorder is used to process the data and view and modify the corresponding Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.

This note is designed to give readers an overview of some useful tools within Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), including offset, vlookup, dynamic charts, form controls, and pivot tables. These tools have purposes such as eliminating errors in data entry or extracting insights from large sets of categorical data. This note contains explanations followed by examples and screenshots for each tool.

Unlike traditional marketers who must wait days, if not weeks, to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, online marketers are confronted with an abundance of data that can be tracked and measured almost in real-time. Despite the volume of data and powerful tools available to online marketers (for free or at low cost, making analytics as affordable for startups as Fortune 500 firms), online metrics are widely misunderstood and misapplied, and are often misused to say much more than they should. Understanding how online metrics work, what they measure, and which of them are most relevant based on specific marketing functions and campaign goals is a valuable skill for every marketer. <br><br>This note frames online metrics in the context of campaign goals (from search marketing to back-end analytics) while discussing the various marketing functions (from display advertising to brand management) that benefit as a result of access to specific metrics. Throughout the note, each metric is placed along a return on investment continuum designed to give insight into the role of each metric over time as it relates to a firm’s bottom line.

Governments throughout the world have offered subsidies for a wide variety of reasons, including increasing investments and jobs (particularly those that are high-tech), stimulating economically depressed regions, supporting domestic agriculture, and preventing bankruptcies through “bail-outs.” Subsidies now play a key role in business location decisions, and impact international competitiveness. Recipients of subsidies can offer their goods and services for sale at lower prices than would exist in the absence of subsidies. Foreign-based corporations may regard these lower prices as unfair competition in international trade. Consequently, international trade negotiations have come to focus on many of these subsidy programs as trade distortions that should be limited by formal international agreements. Some countries, especially the United States, impose special countervail duties if their corporations are being hurt by foreign subsidies. With current and projected reductions in trade barriers, subsidies will become relatively more important as a trade-determining process. Nevertheless, subsidies are implemented to pursue certain social objectives, and so an intergovernmental pact that limits subsidies may diminish, rather than improve, the well being of signatories.

Established in 2006, OSSCube was an open source software development company based in North Carolina, United States, which had its India office in Noida and its development centres in Delhi, Bangalore, and Noida. OSSCube started as a software training provider and gradually emerged as an open source software development and consulting company. The marketing of OSSCube’s offerings was primarily executed by search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives. Later, OSSCube created a social media presence on a variety of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo. The primary objective of creating a presence on these social media platforms was to augment the company’s SEO initiatives. Although this strategy helped OSSCube in gaining business leads, the community manager of the firm realized that the strategy was not building the brand identity of OSSCube. Also, the prospect of having a wide presence on social media platforms to augment SEO activities created confusion in consumers’ minds regarding OSSCube’s expertise. Hence, in 2010, the manager was reviewing the social media approach with some definite objectives such as branding employees, branding OSSCube, and promoting open source software. He faced the challenge of forming an appropriate social media strategy that would address these objectives.

In 1985, the president and founder of New Deantronics (ND) launched her sales office in San Francisco, California, and then set up a factory in Taiwan in 1987. With no technical background or prior experience, the president used her system of management strategy and philosophy and built ND’s reputation as a trusted manufacturer and developer of medical devices. All of ND’s products were directly exported to large global health-care companies, including Philips Medical Systems, Johnson & Johnson, and Covidien. With the rapid increase in business, the need for expanding production capacity became increasingly urgent. Sitting in her office in early 2009, the president knew that she could no longer postpone her decision to relocate. Several options were presented to her, and the factors that influenced her decision included considerations about the supply of quality human resources, geographical convenience, the willingness of her current employees to relocate, affordability, and the possibility for future expansion. The president pondered what would be the best bet.

This case is a supplement to A Non-Traditional Female Entrepreneur (A).