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This case chronicles the creation and transformation of a Singaporean joint venture, Eagle Services Asia (ESA). It describes some early start-up problems, including a forced shutdown by the Civilian Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS). The resulting shakeup of the ESA management team provides a fresh start and an opportunity to reinvigorate the company using lean management principles. Managerial decisions play a key role in ESA's success, together with the discipline and training of the workforce. Students will gain an understanding of cultural difficulties associated with international joint ventures, and learn fundamental aspects of lean management including how to create and sustain a lean culture. The case also provides insight into the worldwide aircraft engine business, the engine overhaul process and cultural barriers that may arise when managing operations in foreign countries.

The vice-president marketing (VP) for iMPath Networks, a leading provider of managed video networks for surveillance and enterprise applications, is presented with an offer to take over as CEO of the firm. It was October 2001 and iMPath was in poor shape after growth in expenses outpaced sales growth from 1999 to 2000 when the firm pursued aggressive growth targets in international markets while increasing the number of employees. Unfortunately for the firm, the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 and along with it, hopes of rapid expansion. Faced with an essentially insolvent entity, iMPath's venture capital backers decided to extend the VP an offer to save the firm.

Dr. David Cechetto, a University of Western Ontario (UWO) medical professor, left Rwanda after a distressing week. Having seen first-hand the impact of the 1994 genocide and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Cechetto committed himself to accept the request from UWO and the Rector of the National University of Rwanda to direct a project to help rebuild Rwanda's health sector. As he was flying back to London, Ontario, he began to prepare a proposal for funding to be submitted within six months. His first decision was who his Rwandan partner or partners should be in this project.

Supplement to Air Deccan (A): Changing the Face of Indian Aviation, product #9B07A001. By November 2005 Air Deccan, India's first low cost airline, had been in business for two years. During this time, the airline had grown rapidly, adding both planes and passengers at breakneck speed. Using low fares as its central strength, it had caused huge, unconventional changes in the Indian domestic airline industry. Not satisfied, however, the founder and chief executive officer wondered how to adapt to the future and sustain Air Deccan's tremendous initial success.

The founders of Just Us! Coffee Cooperative (Just Us!) are involved in a strategic planning process. The growing demand and acceptance of fair trade products is good news for the industry and opens many opportunities for Just Us!, but there are also risks. Just Us! will likely face increased market competition from major U.S. retail coffee brands and Canadian supermarket brands, pressure on margins as more brands crowd the shelves, and more competition for access to top quality sources of supply. Just Us! will have to make strategic choices and will have to develop a clear and focused marketing plan.

In 2006, Ruth's Chris Steak House was fresh off of a sizzling initial public offering and was now interested in growing their business internationally. With restaurants in just four countries outside the United States, a model to identify and rank new international markets was needed. This case provides a practical example for students to take quantitative and non-quantitative variables to create a short list of potential new markets.

A recent MBA graduate was about to return to the family business, Biomed Co., Ltd. as its general manager. Biomed's parent company, Thai Drugs Co., Ltd. has just revised Biomed's market strategy, a change that created the need to align the sales compensation system to fit with the new strategy. The new general manager was charged with this responsibility. Students will work through the path from strategy to a powerful sales compensation plan that will support the strategy and encourage to execute the role of the salesforce within this strategy.

The new chief executive officer (CEO) of ING Insurance Asia/Pacific wants to improve the regional operation of the company. ING Group was a global financial services company of Dutch origin with more than 150 years of experience. As part of ING International, ING Insurance Asia/Pacific was responsible for life insurance and asset/wealth management activities throughout the region. The company was doing well, but the new CEO believed that there were still important strategic and operational improvements possible. This case can be used to discuss the local versus regional or global management issue and will yield best results if the class has already been introduced to different strategic and organizational alternatives in the international business context.

Over the past two years, ING Insurance Asia/Pacific had successfully implemented a new organizational and operational framework called Towards Performance Excellence (TPE), which was developed with inputs from functional heads, senior management and staff at the business unit level. TPE detailed and organized everything ING Asia/Pacific needed to execute its strategy effectively. TPE divided ING's business processes into six core categories: portfolio, marketing, organizational, operational, reputation and financial. Each category included aspects of execution known as drivers, which required managers to identify specific objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each driver or sub-driver. The case includes many original exhibits and is ideally taught as the follow up case of the ING Insurance Asia/Pacific, Ivey product #9B06M083 or as a standalone case, which illustrates a real example of regional versus local organizational management.

In 2006 Wal-Mart, the second largest firm in the world by sales, was looking to improve its already efficient supply chain. The company's supply chain was closely integrated with its retail and information systems strategies and has been developed incrementally over the past 40 years. However, rivals are copying every aspect, from the way Wal-Mart cross-docks product in warehouses, to Wal-Mart's use of a sophisticated database to capture, store and disseminate store-level information to suppliers. Wal-Mart's new executive vice-president, logistics was overseeing a handful of initiatives designed to improve the firm's supply chain. However, it was not certain that these initiatives were going to have a significant impact on Wal-Mart costs, and he needed to consider what the company should do to stay ahead of the competition.

Faced with capacity constraints at the company's river fed facilities, the president and general manager of Piscifactorias de los Andes (Piscis), the largest trout farming company in Peru, is considering an option to create a trout farm on Lake Titicaca. Although Titicaca was the largest lake in South America and was in many ways ideally suited to trout farming, all previous attempts to commercialize the lake's fishery had failed. In addition, Piscis faced potential opposition from local fishers and environmentalists. Titicaca was also too distant from the company's existing fish plants. Therefore, if it were to establish operations on the lake, Piscis would need to build a processing plant at a cost of several million dollars. However, because of the region's history of political instability and violence, financial institutions were reluctant to offer loans.

A student project team must recommend to a firm whether or not it should acquire its largest competitor in the salmon farming industry, and if so, at what maximum price. The case does not provide enough information for students to solve the case, instead, students must think about the data and analysis they would need in order to answer their client's question. This case highlights framing a strategic problem for analysis and decision making as well as the preliminary analysis and planning required for efficient and effective data gathering. The case provides an opportunity to focus on secondary sources of data and introduces students to the resources available through the university library.

The founder and executive director of E+Co faces the challenge of ten-fold growth and reviews the core parts of the company's innovative business model, the changes in the energy markets around the world, and the rationale for local solutions to energy scarcity and inefficiency. Also presented is a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model - i.e., simultaneously tackling energy poverty and energy waste, and bringing people up the energy ladder with locally suitable and affordable solutions. These strategies help consolidate and leverage E+Co's 12 years of experience and strong local presence through an innovative combination of complementary wedges.

The director and co-founder of Honey Care Africa (Honey Care) looks back over the six years of operations and describes the original business model and several sequential changes based on feedback from rural communities, partner organizations, and learning by doing through field operations. Increasing international recognition highlights the potential impact of the model on inspiring sustainable grassroots ventures in the agriculture sector in Kenya. For Tanzania and other developing countries, he ponders the potential opportunities and challenges in replicating the Honey Care model elsewhere. The case also tackles alternative routes for scaling up the model in East Africa. Students are presented with several specific challenges which illustrate the growing tension between Honey Care's original commitment to the farmers and its prospects for international take-off, and are asked to propose alternative model reconfigurations to resolve this tension.

The corporate manager of vehicle planning at Nissan Canada Inc. had been asked by the director of vehicle ordering for Nissan North America (NNA), to review the proposed vehicle ordering process as part of the new Integrated Customer Order Network (ICON). The ICON project would change Nissan's North American vehicle ordering process from a 'make-to-stock' into a 'make-to-order' environment which called for a significant process transformation for Nissan's operations in North America and Japan. The corporate manager of vehicle planning was hoping that the new process would be exactly what the dealers were seeking in an effort to closer align production with customer demand. However, he needed to evaluate the new process from the perspective of all stakeholders to ensure that Nissan's business objectives could be met.

Shopster.com is a Calgary-based e-business company whose business is to assist other individuals or companies in setting up their own retail transactional websites. Shopster differs significantly from ordinary website developers in that retailers are able to select from a huge inventory of saleable products, through Shopster's network of goods providers. Shopster also provides software tools, and expertise, to allow anyone wishing to create an online retail store to do so quickly and easily. Shopster's business has done well to date, but there are plenty of operational challenges ahead. As well, the principals would like to raise the bar substantially, to something they refer to as Shopster 2.0, the specifics of which are still at a formative stage. The Shopster case provides an interesting example of a small but rapidly growing Canadian company with an innovative business model and big dreams for the future.

The managing director and director of overseas marketing of Midea Group, China's largest air conditioner manufacturer, had concerns about the company's domestic and global competitive position. They felt the company needed to develop a strategy to defend its home market in the wake of more liberalized imports, and simultaneously, develop the resources and skills required to play in a global market where its cost advantages had been nullified because international players were also exporting from China. To do so, they needed to review the company's current international strategy and examine both branding and private label options.

A managing director of international equities for a large public sector pension fund has to decide how the pension fund would vote on say for pay. Say for pay represents a vote held at the annual general meeting whereby shareholders have an annual and non-binding (thus it has no legal effect on the board or the corporation) opportunity to vote on executive compensation. Such a vote is obligatory in Australia and the United Kingdom and is starting to be practised in the United States. The case introduces students to elements of executive compensation, governance issues with executive compensation, the compensation analysis process, and the business model of investment bank / merchant banks and the use of private equity funds as vehicles to create value and retain value to the general partner and shareholders or the investment bank / merchant bank.

Information technologies outsourcing is one the emergent fast-growth industries in the global high-tech economy. India is the leading country for IT outsourcing and Infosys is the largest Indian company in this sector. The branding challenge for Infosys is to leverage its reputation for predictable excellent results for information technology outsourcing. Management had identified overall company top-line revenue growth to achieve 30-40 per cent annual increases while allocating a negligible budget for marketing communications. Therefore, the key to the global brand strategy would not be through brand image advertising, but through communications of product strategy developments to large global IT outsourcing companies. The goal for Infosys is to be on the short-list of providers for the large, most sophisticated assignments for IT services to bid against IBM and Accenture, while leapfrogging over other competitors in the fast growing and fragmented information technology outsourcing market.

Set in November 2005, the case examines a company that has been extremely successful in several product categories in its own domestic market and is defending its market position against intense competition from powerful multinational corporations, emerging domestic rivals and newer low-cost alternatives. The multinational corporations include some of the world's most sophisticated marketing companies. The case may be used independently or with the supplement Splash Corporation (B): International Expansion, product 9B06A015.