CenturyPly India Limited (CPIL), a large wood panel products company with a supply network spread across India, had four main product lines, including laminates. In April 2020, the company’s laminates range was a growth focus for management on account of its profitability and expected growth. Despite the availability of capacity, good demand, a range of designs, and inventory at the distribution centres, CPIL’s order fill rates were less than satisfactory. The management team decided to look at its supply chain and identify solutions that could help. Based on the available data on sales, inventory, and lost sales, the management team needed to identify crucial insights that would help them take the best decisions. One important question was, How could the company adjust its current make-to-order supply chain to ensure it could meet order demands in a timely fashion and avoid losing potential sales?
This case is about designing and scaling up an innovative business model that leverages technology to solve the age-old Indian problem of expensive, unreliable, and unresponsive rural distribution of consumer goods. It explores an important decision concerning the growth path of a digital native, unicorn organization, ElasticRun, via exploit-led or explore-led strategy. The case is an inspiration to managers to take on yet-unsolved problems by leveraging the potential of crowdsourcing and technology.
The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, faced a unique challenge in the manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to its major stakeholders. SII had COVID-19 vaccine manufacture and supply commitments to COVAX, a joint initiative ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries and a transfer technology (licensing) agreement with AstraZeneca PLC to supply its COVID-19 vaccine. However, a sudden surge of COVID-19 cases in India during the second wave of the pandemic sharply increased demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the country, forcing the government of India to temporarily ban the export of vaccines from India. At the same time, a ban imposed by the United States on the export of critical raw materials and components used for vaccine manufacturing threatened to bring the vaccine production process at SII to a halt. SII’s chief executive officer had to now juggle meeting domestic demand within India and fulfilling SII’s international supply commitments. Failing to deliver on the commitments would not only spell legal trouble but also pose long-term reputational and business risks for his company. He had few options to navigate the situation.
<p align="justify/">In 2021, the chair of the admissions committee at The School of Management in Gandhinagar, India, had only three months to prepare for the start of the school’s next master of business administration program. During these three months, prospective students who had received admission offers could decide to decline offers, even though some had already paid relevant fees. Understanding the uncertainty of those decisions was critical to estimate the number of additional offers to send out to other candidates. If the final number of prospective students joining the program was lower than the school’s available capacity, The School of Management would lose contributions toward its fixed business costs and potential profit. It would also mean that the school’s resources would be underused. On the other hand, denying admission to students who had received offers to join the program, due to a lack of space, could adversely affect the school’s brand image and future admissions. Understanding the decision-making process of prospective students was critical over the long term to develop appropriate retention strategies and encourage all candidates to accept their admission offers.</p>
Based in India, Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd. (BFF) designed, developed, assembled, and distributed educational activities and games for Grade 1–10 students to help them understand various science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts. After more than a decade of existence, BFF had grown significantly in terms of production capacity, human resources, product portfolio, and geographical reach. Between 2010 and 2019, its revenues had grown 15 times. In November 2019, the company's chief executive officer faced three challenges: (1) the firm's inability to meet orders for newly introduced products; (2) its limited ability to tap and serve the huge market of 1.5 million schools across India; and (3) its failure to capture the enormous potential of selling educational toys online—a $300 million market. The chief executive officer believed that the traditional cost structure of centralized design, production, and distribution might not support the non-linear growth he envisaged for the company, so he had collected the value-added details for one of BFF's products with the intention of evaluating alternate value chain configurations for the company.
In April 2017, Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd., in Hyderabad, India, was experiencing a rapid growth in demand and needed to find ways to expand its capacity to meet this demand without significantly increasing costs. The company created innovative teaching and learning products for students in grades 1 through 10. Working with these products hands-on helped students understand various mathematics and science concepts such as magnetism, light, and sound. The founder and chief executive officer asked the head of production and stores to evaluate the company’s existing production processes and capacity and to suggest options for improvement at a senior management meeting, scheduled for a week later.