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Coloplast's future global manufacturing strategy was based on relocation of volume production of mature product lines to low cost countries like Hungary and China, whereas most creative and innovative activities (pilot production, ramp-up and range care) were held captive in Denmark. The large scale project of offshoring, first volume production and later perhaps other activities, to Tatabanya, Hungary constituted a major shift in the operational strategy for Coloplast, which resulted in a series of organizational and managerial challenges. An important feature of the case is the surprise to the management team of how challenging it was to globalize the operations despite Coloplast's international experience operating a network of subsidiaries in more than 26 countries. The management team learned a lesson of how important it is to have the structure, the organization and the mindset in place when offshoring production. Sourcing internationally is obviously very different from selling internationally as it involves the entire organization. The learning process of the management team and the challenges they faced is unfolded in this case.

A carpenter is considering options for improving the manufacturing process of his custom wood-flooring concept. He started the business as a part-time venture and wanted to increase production efficiency to accommodate the growing interest for his pine flooring design. The carpenter was unsure whether he should invest in new equipment or hire part-time labor, but he knew that either way, he would have to change the current process to ensure that capacity would meet the upcoming year's forecasted demand.

This case (1834.0 and related epilogue 1834.1 and abridged case 1834.3) tells the story of Major General David Petraeus and the US Army's 101st Airborne Division in the months following the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fall of Baghdad, and collapse of Saddam Hussein's government. Having completed their combat mission, and with just a few days notice, the 101st is ordered to Mosul, Iraq's third largest city and the capital of Nineveh province. Their orders were spare - get up to Mosul and Nineveh Province and get things under control. The case details the development and implementation of the 101st strategy to bring stability to Mosul and the surrounding area and provides insight into General David Petraeus and his approach to leadership. While set in a military organization in wartime, the case is not about military operations. Petraeus and his division, with little notice or preparation, undertake traditionally civilian tasks associated with reconstruction and governance. HKS Case Number 1834.3

A service delivery failure in the Mount Rundle Hotel escalates into a full-fledged confrontation between hotel management and the customer. The hotel general manager has an inward focus and is more intent on managing internal company systems and processes than catering to customer needs. The delay in responding effectively to the service failure leads to the involvement of the Better Business Bureau of Alberta, the Banff Lake Louise Tourism Development Board and the Banff mayor's office.

In exemplary service organizations, executives understand that they need to put customers and frontline workers at the center of their focus. Those managers heed the factors that drive profitability in this service paradigm: investment in people, technology that supports frontline workers, revamped recruiting and training practices, and compensation linked to performance. They also express a vision of leadership in somewhat unconventional terms, referring to an organization's "patina of spirituality" and the "importance of the mundane." In this article, Heskett, Jones, Loveman, Sasser, and Schlesinger take a close look at the links in the service-profit chain, which puts hard values on soft measures so that managers can calibrate the impact of employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity on the value of products and services delivered. Managers can then use this information to build customer satisfaction and loyalty and assess the corresponding impact on profitability and growth. Describing the links in the service-profit chain, the authors explain that profit and growth are stimulated by customer loyalty; loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction; satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers; value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees; and employee satisfaction, in turn, results from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers. By completing the authors' service-profit chain audit, companies can determine not only what drives their profit but how they can sustain it in the long term.

A carpenter is considering options for improving the manufacturing process of his custom wood-flooring concept. He started the business as a part-time venture and wanted to increase production efficiency to accommodate the growing interest for his pine flooring design. The carpenter was unsure whether he should invest in new equipment or hire part-time labour, but he knew that either way, he would have to change the current process to ensure that capacity would meet the upcoming year's forecasted demand.

This case describes how a company improves resource efficiency and process quality in its manufacturing process by developing a waste by-product into a new product. The case describes how CCP cleans production equipment between batches using styrene, which becomes a costly hazardous waste. Having worked on minimizing waste for the past 20 years, CCP believed it could not reduce the use of styrene without risking product quality. Instead, CCP was exploring the development of a by-product from its "rinse styrene," but faces uncertainty regarding the operational, financial, and environmental implications of doing so. This case contains data to support quantitative analyses of financial, operational, and environmental issues including some basic life-cycle analysis (LCA) calculations that focus on greenhouse gas emissions.

Considers the situation facing Gary Gottlieb, president of Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), prior to the opening of BWH's integrated cardiovascular center. This case allows students to develop an appreciation of the strategic, financial, organizational, clinical, and physical aspects of integrating health care delivery around specific categories of disease. It provides an opportunity to evaluate BWH's approach to integration along all of these dimensions and to identify the nature of the tradeoffs that hospitals--specifically, academic medical centers--face as they attempt to create disease-specific models of integrated care. Finally, students have the opportunity to evaluate the degree to which integrated models of care can be developed within academic medical centers.

The B Case is an email from the ED Director. He clarifies where the process deviations occurred.

Brigham and Women's Hospital challenged a team of physicians to improve patient flow from the Emergency Department to Intensive Care Units (ICUs). One of the team members, Selwyn Rogers, Director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) at Brigham and Women's Hospital, encountered workarounds by two physicians attempting to transfer their patients to the SICU because the other ICUs were full. Reflecting on the wasted effort and confusion caused by the workarounds, Rogers sent an email outlining the situation to the team. His email generated a negative backlash and chain of defensive emails from involved staff who felt criticized.

In 1999, the nonprofit Fair Labor Association (FLA) was launched to monitor factories around the world for sweatshop-related infractions. Another key nonprofit player, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), was launched in 2000. The two organizations had similar goals, but very different histories, strategies, and ways of operating. One major difference was that the FLA board included corporations, while the WRC board contained no industry representatives, but only representatives from the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), member universities, and labor-allied NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Mission-wise, the FLA focused on all apparel, while the WRC only focused on apparel bearing college and university names and logos. The fact that the FLA included company/industry representatives on its policy-making board, and the WRC did not, created not merely a difference but a source of immediate disagreement and conflict. By 2008, the WRC had grown from a membership of 44 colleges and universities at its founding to 174, and the FLA had grown from 100 colleges and universities to 205. Although the two organizations had often been closely associated together, appearing on panels, and even occasionally collaborating, their shared history had been controversial and tumultuous. Among the issues under continuing dispute were the role of third-party labor unions (which were not allowed by the government in countries such as China and Vietnam), the problem of "living wages" (which would raise production costs considerably), allegations voiced on the website "FLA Watch" (which seemed to many to be one-sided and unfair), and the overall impact of the anti-sweatshop movement's efforts (which led some to question how much progress had been made).

The chief of paediatric orthopaedic surgery was very concerned by the long times that the young patients (and their parents) were experiencing in the orthopaedic clinic. Long wait times tended to aggravate the already pent-up distress and concern that the patients were facing. The chief glanced at recently collected data on service times and wondered how the process could be improved, while continuing balancing budgetary pressures to reduce costs. Moreover, any changes couldn't be done in isolation, as her clinic shared resources with other departments. A monthly executive meeting was fast approaching and expectations were starting to run high that her efforts might be able to spur improvements in other departments too.

After negotiations with a key supplier for lower prices and quicker turnaround go nowhere, two employees of Acme Medical Imaging realize there's no more low-hanging fruit to pick to keep their project on time and on budget -- no more concessions from external parties, no more superficial, short-term fixes. They have to convince their chief executive officer and the project team to take a hard look at internal processes. From the perspective of Operations, this case examines the challenges that can arise - and some steps that can be taken - when the greatest obstacles to a project are the people and procedures responsible for its success.

New research suggests that Chinese companies' price advantage comes not from low-cost labor but from massive government subsidies. That finding has major implications for foreign firms that compete with, or source from, those companies.

If your company embraced the reengineering revolution and is now hitting a wall, look beyond business processes to the new frontier of efficiency: the activities that make up those processes. Advances in IT - especially a relatively recent one called service-oriented architecture - are making it possible to design and deploy business activities as Lego-like software components, which can help transform your business into a highly productive plug-and-play operation. SOA enables discrete activities to be accessed via the internet and to be easily updated, shared, bought, and sold - both within your organization and externally. Most companies have thought of SOA merely as an easier, less expensive way to maintain the software that supports existing operations. By failing to revisit their organizational designs before applying SOA, however, these businesses are missing an opportunity to replace proprietary processes and activities with standardized, fungible ones. That's the nuanced argument made by Merrifield, of Microsoft; Calhoun, of Accelare; and Stevens, of Synaptus. To guide you through the intricacies of revisiting your operations, they outline an approach called a business capabilities analysis. Their method involves diagramming your company's work activities, describing the capabilities that support them, valuing and assessing the performance of both, and creating a heat map that helps identify the priorities for an improvement program. The authors share real-world examples of companies that have reaped rewards from this self-analysis and subsequent SOA implementation. They also acknowledge the barriers to applying SOA, including the gulf between CEOs and their IT departments. The leaders who overcome such obstacles, say the authors, will pioneer the next great leap in corporate productivity.

A multiunit enterprise is a geographically dispersed organization built from standard units (stores, restaurants, or branches) that are aggregated into larger geographic groupings (districts, regions, and divisions). Although this organizational structure has become the norm in several industries, it has received little attention from academics and consultants. Garvin and Levesque set out to fill that gap in management thinking with their research. The authors closely studied the office supply company Staples for two years and then collected data from 12 other multiunit enterprises. In this article, they discuss the unique problems that such corporations face, describe how managers tackle those challenges, and offer lessons that will help all types of organizations execute strategy. In a multiunit enterprise, four tiers of management constitute the field organization: store, district, regional, and divisional heads. All these managers are responsible for meeting targets set by corporate headquarters and implementing strategy. To do so, they adhere to five principles of organizational design. First, the field organization's different tiers have overlapping responsibilities; together they create a multilayered net to catch any problems that arise. Second, managers at all levels serve as integrators, coordinating diverse activities and optimizing the efforts of the whole organization rather than its parts. Third, higher-level managers filter data from headquarters to frontline managers, who otherwise might feel overwhelmed by a constant stream of initiatives. Fourth, regional and divisional heads in particular act as translators, defining in concrete terms how the field organization can roll out initiatives. Finally, all managers share responsibility for talent development.

In December 2007, more than 75 percent of all U.S. Internet users streamed some form of video online, consuming over 10 billion videos in total. While devices such as AppleTV and TiVo allowed users to watch Internet video on their televisions, Internet-delivered video was largely a web-based phenomenon. Despite this, the industry was preparing for the inexorable collision of Internet video and the television. While a video signal could be fed over coaxial cable, through copper wires or over fiber optic connections, the majority of U.S. consumers would continue to receive their television signal and Internet service through a wired connection for the foreseeable future. This case examines the transition to IP video delivery in 2008 from the perspective of those companies that own the "pipe," notably telecommunications companies, descendants of the 1982 AT&T divestiture, and cable companies, otherwise known as Multiple System Operators (MSOs).

Chi Mei is a Taiwanese industrial group that makes a major diversification into the technology intensive TFT-LCD flat panel display industry. Because the diversification is far away from its core competence in petrochemicals, it is an opportunity to examine how the firm was able to become a global leader in the relatively short span of ten years. Such organic diversifications are relatively unusual by Western standards, especially into technologies and markets that have relatively high entry barriers and where there is no deep rooted national technological or scientific foundation. As such Chi Mei is an interesting vehicle to examine the rise of a major Asian industrial cluster with global scope which has no participants or competitors in the West. The case can also be used to expose students to the global supply chain for key information technology components. Taiwan and Korea are today the major world centers for the manufacture of semiconductors (in particular DRAMs and FLASH memory) and flat panel displays. Taiwan is also the center for notebook computer manufacturing, and Taiwanese companies, through their China-based manufacturing and assembly operations, drive 60% of the IT exports from China. Yet few students even know the identity of these major global players. Taiwan and Korea based TFT-LCD flat panels are the critical components in notebook computers, computer monitors, and flat panel televisions from essentially all well known global brands.

The case describes the strategic situation facing Carlos Ghosn and the Renault-Nissan Alliance in 2008 and beyond. One set of strategic issues concerns how to exploit to a greater extent the potential of the novel organization form - a sort of supra-corporate ecological system - that the Alliance represents. A second set of strategic issues concerns the further evolution of the Alliance - what Ghosn calls the "fourth stage" - in light of the dynamic forces that are reshaping the global automotive industry, and especially the issue of how to further scale-up the Alliance. A third set of strategic issues concerns developing further the strategic leadership capability of the Alliance and the evolving role of Carlos Ghosn as CEO of both Renault and Nissan.

Does an organization's commitment to diversity--as reflected by CEO commitment, human capital, corporate communications (internal and external), and supplier diversity - result in competitive advantage and superior financial performance? Diversity can bring new voices and perspectives into the strategy dialogue, help managers understand and address the needs of a demographically diverse customer base, and stimulate a wider range of creative decision alternatives. However, the anticipated benefits of corporate diversity efforts may also be accompanied by costs that can affect shareholder wealth. In a study comparing the financial performance of the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity to a matched sample, we find evidence that firms with a strong commitment to diversity outperform their peers on average. For commitment to diversity to become ingrained in corporate culture there must be visible and ongoing support from senior management, a clear articulation of the business case for diversity, line manager accountability, and training programs directed at communications, conflict resolution, and team building.