The summer of 2014 posed challenges for the food start-up, EazyMeals, which operated in the low-cost daily meals segment (lunch and dinner only), catering to the densely populated region of Indirapuram, in the Delhi National Capital Region. EazyMeals catered to the young millennial population of the area, who were looking for low-cost, fresh food that was served in a hygienic way. It also catered to local small businesses, who mostly ordered lunch, and senior citizens residing there, who mostly ordered lunch and dinner. The company’s founder was facing multiple challenges. First, he faced the problem of unit economics: his operating margins per order were barely sufficient to meet his operational fixed costs. Second, even though order volumes had surged, which could have cushioned the overall margins, the demand for quicker deliveries meant faster turnaround times in the kitchen, and this in turn meant investing more on staff and fixed costs to meet customer expectations. Third, he needed a way to bypass the food-ordering platforms (FoPs) that were providing a large chunk of his orders. They operated on a commission basis, which was further eating into his operating margins.
Jim Collins, executive director of Harvest Hands, was very active in the day-to-day operations of Harvest Hands, but he also bore the responsibility for planning for the future of the registered charity. Jim together with his wife, Jacintha Collins, founded Harvest Hands in 2020 in St. Thomas, Ontario. In less than three years, their charity had distributed over $7.6 million in rescued food to food banks, missions, and over 120 local agencies. An impressive accomplishment for a volunteer-run charity. Their policy of “We never say no” was quickly pushing the capacity limits of the organization and Jim needed to consider the options for expanding Harvest Hands to keep up with both growing demand and supply.
Hefu Catering Management Co. Ltd. (Hefu) was founded in 2012 as a high-end Chinese noodle chain brand. Its mission was to promote Chinese culture through Chinese fast food on a global scale. In 2018, Hefu experienced significant demand growth. To ensure a steady supply of safe, fresh, and organic foods, Hefu established a centralized kitchen in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, serving 300 restaurants in nearby cities. As Hefu expanded into North and Central China, it faced challenges in delivering fresh food from the centralized kitchen to meet the demands of all its restaurants.
Infra Travel Agency (ITA), a well-established player in Europe’s travel industry, faced declining revenues and sought to diversify into the electric vehicle sector to boost revenue and lead in reducing its carbon footprint. ITA aimed for a revenue increase of 20 per cent and required route optimization software to support this new vertical. To achieve this goal, ITA required advanced route optimization software and selected Tech Consulting Ltd. (TCL) for its development. The project began in February 2023, following a final statement of work signed in March. Despite initial optimism, the project faced significant issues, including disappointing demo results and delays in reaching the minimum viable product by May 2023. By that time, only 12 per cent of the planned work had been completed, while 30 per cent of the budget had already been spent. In response to escalating concerns, TCL replaced its initial delivery manager with Frank Raju. As the year progressed, Raju faced the challenges of addressing stakeholder trust issues, managing project scope, and ensuring alignment to secure a successful outcome by the end of the fiscal year.
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?
On November 9, 2020, Chhavi Jain wanted to participate in a contest created by her college friend Vikas Jack on the Dream11 mobile application. The contest was for the final match of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020 between the Delhi Capitals and the Mumbai Indians scheduled for November 10. In the contest, each user must create a team of 11 players. A user’s performance was evaluated based on their team’s performance in the live match. Jain faced the dilemma of selecting the 11 players for her team on Dream11. The number of credits for each player was different, depending on their past performance, and the total credit sum of all players had to be less than 100 credits. She did not know the players and their past performances in the IPL. Which players should she select in her team to increase her chances of winning the contest?
On a day in early June 2017, Fadi Kanaan, a member of the organizing committee of the Beirut International Model United Nations (BEYMUN) conference at the American University of Beirut (AUB), sat in front of college hall feeling very excited yet worried. He had just received an email informing him that he would be the secretary-general of the annual Model United Nations conference at AUB in the spring of 2018. BEYMUN invited students from universities worldwide who were interested in addressing global concerns and prevailing world topics in a real-life simulation of the United Nations committee sessions. This conference was the perfect opportunity for participants to tackle such topics as regional conflicts, women and children, human rights, peacemaking, disarmament, economic and social development, and the environment while working in committees for Disarmament and International Security, Economic and Financial, Social Humanitarian and Cultural, and Special Political and Decolonization. But Kanaan was worried how BEYMUN would manage the overwhelming application process. Previously, the BEYMUN team had experienced issues with organizing large events, and Kanaan realized the existing system that received applications was inadequate for processing the hundreds of applications he expected the conference to receive. He knew that within two weeks of announcing the conference dates, applications would start to pour in. Kanaan and the team had to respond to each application before a deadline. Now was the time for BEYMUN to develop a system that would efficiently manage and process the applications to help organize a successful conference.
As managers face a flood of data, it is very important that they effectively analyze and interpret the available data to make decisions. Plotting data will help them in their analysis and interpretation of raw data. The same is true for students in business programs. However, students in business programs (and managers) often do not see the importance of plotting data. This exercise presents a typical classroom scenario in which the professor of data visualization quotes statistician John W. Tukey to his students and tries to drive home the importance of plotting data. A representative student understands about presenting summary statistics and running some statistical tests, but questions the usefulness of plotting points as well. The professor must decide how to teach the class about the merits of plotting data. The professor gives the student an assignment with data and instructions, and tells the student to report the class the next day. The student is unaware that he has been given the Anscombe quartet, and he becomes convinced of the benefits of plotting data.
A.P. Møller – Mærsk A/S (Maersk) dominated the shipping business as the world’s second-largest container shipping company in terms of fleet size and capacity of handling cargo. In December 2023, Houthi attacks on various Maersk vessels passing through the Red Sea interrupted supply chains from Asia to Europe. One Maersk vessel was hit by a missile while travelling from Salalah, Oman to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Maersk temporarily halted all its container shipments via the Red Sea route. One week after resuming travel, a second Maersk vessel was hit. Container ship operations in the Red Sea were again forced to stop. The US Central Command and other co-operative groups such as the Combined Maritime Forces intervened to help normalize the unrest created by Houthi rebels but their efforts had little impact. Maersk’s share price fell by almost 5 per cent in December 2023. Maersk was wondering how to resolve its situation and move forward. Should it evaluate alternative routes or transportation modes to continue providing seamless shipping services to its clients? Should Maersk continue or enhance its recently implemented policies for transit disruption fees? Or should Maersk follow a demand-driven route, in addition to the disruption fees, to maintain vessel and crew safety?
Contrary to the typical practice of cutting operating expenses by compromising on employees’ benefits, the chairman of Zentaku Kogyo Company Ltd. (Zentaku), David Wu Chongrang, aimed to improve the standard of living of his staff by steadily raising their salaries and benefits. In fact, the key performance indicator David had set for himself was to raise his employees’ salaries regularly to a preset target benchmark. Contrary to conventional approaches, over the past sixteen years (2006–2022) David had reduced Zentaku’s revenue by 28 per cent and the number of employees by two-thirds, while raising the annual gross profit per employee to 239 per cent. Zentaku had achieved more with less by transforming itself through the rigorous implementation of lean production, inspired by the famed Toyota Production System, but Zentaku’s future leadership now faced challenges in sustaining the success Zentaku had achieved. Were the management methods adopted in the past applicable to the younger generation of workers? How could the current management pass the enterprise to the younger generation while ensuring employees remained fulfilled in the workplace?
Rebel Foods (Rebel) was the world’s largest internet restaurant company, with 45 food brands and 450 kitchens in 10 countries. As Rebel scaled up, they were gradually venturing into the business-to-business (B2B) space by partnering with other food brands. Their transition to a B2B model, although necessary, had some challenges. As their reliance on third-party food delivery partners continued to drive up costs, Rebel considered how to better integrate their supply chain. However, their food delivery partners provided greater brand visibility. In Rebel’s one-kitchen many brands model, would they be able to leverage technology and automation to scale up and expand successfully?
The World Economic Forum and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company collaborated with academics to create the concept of lighthouse factories in 2018. The concept represents a vision for manufacturing in the digital age, in which cutting-edge digital technologies are designed and deployed to enable innovative manufacturing practices to be implemented at large scale. The concept has since become a global standard for digital manufacturing. For McKinsey & Company, and other consulting firms, this vision brings significant opportunities but also requires these organizations and their consultants to obtain an in-depth and nuanced understanding of lighthouse factories and the underlying business models, practices, technologies, and cases.
In 2020, Ford Motor Company (Ford), a global automaker, embarked on a transformative journey toward electrification with the introduction of the Ford Electric Vehicle Strategy. This case examines Ford’s approach to meeting the electrification challenge, particularly in response to California’s Executive Order N-79-20, which mandated the phase-out of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. The case provides insights into Ford’s activities and highlights the challenges and opportunities inherent in the electrification space.
Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) was backed by the government in India as an innovative solution to onboard numerous small-scale retailers and other businesses to participate in the digital commerce ecosystem comprised primarily of e-commerce platforms, on-demand food delivery, and ride-sharing platforms, through standard technology and processes, policies, and entrepreneurship. ONDC was officially incorporated in December 2021 under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade as a non-profit section 8 company. As a set of protocols to foster open, unbundled, and interoperable networks, ONDC-enabled communication among various players or entities of an e-commerce transaction. Functions of typical e-commerce such as discovery, matching, order fulfillment, or delivery were unbundled so that multiple players could execute each of these steps independently. ONDC had onboarded seller-side apps (applications interacting with merchants), buyer-side apps (applications interacting with consumers), logistics providers, and customers over the past two years, but the scale of ONDC’s growth was limited compared to existing players. Also, there were considerable questions on ONDC’s decisions pertaining to continual subsidy offerings for sellers and discounts to customers.<br><br>Some success was seen in areas of hyperlocal mobility through apps developed on ONDC such as Namma Yatri and hyperlocal delivery of restaurant food, but order volume was an impending issue. Technology service provider firms stepped forward to help sellers in building and managing services. In the latter half of 2023, Antler Innovation Private Limited ONDC was launched to fund, train, and onboard promising participants in the network. ONDC now had to strategically address areas in which it needed to make investments, whom to subsidize and charge, how to enable scaling, and formulate effective governing policies.
In March 2020, the leadership team at Toronto General Hospital (TGH) needs to plan resources to accommodate the new influx of COVID-19 ICU patients. Key resources for ICU capacity include beds, physicians, nurses, and PPE. The current demand coming from two streams of patients (elective surgeries & emergencies) is expected to overwhelm the ICU capacity, but by slowing down elective surgeries, TGH can mitigate the situation. The optimal proportion of COVID to total ICU patients must be analyzed considering the impact on physicians, nurses, patients awaiting elective surgeries, and PPE. The case allows students to take the role of a hospital leader deciding on allocating capacity across resource pools and recommend an ICU action plan.