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The director of information technology (IT) at Ritcher, a major Hungarian pharmaceutical company with operations throughout Eastern Europe, is in the midst of planning for the IT department for the coming years. The three main considerations for the coming year are: Is the current IT structure appropriate to meet the growing demands of the overall organization? To what extent should IT affiliates be centrally controlled? How can IT best serve the rest of the company?

Most of the green buildings constructed over the past decade in the United States have been white-collar workplaces such as office buildings and schools. The greening of blue-collar workplaces, from warehouses to factories, has lagged far behind - but that's beginning to change.

Through the example of the high-profile Eurotunnel project, the case shows how important contracts and agreements are in project management. Seen through a retrospective lens, it allows students to analyse the relative contributions of market uncertainty, technical uncertainty, and behaviour alignment through contracts, to the performance problems of the effort to construct the first-ever undersea rail link between France and the UK.

Dr. Bradford Shingleton has developed some of the highest quality eye surgery techniques in the industry. He involves his nurses and technicians in creating a surgical service that is constantly improving. The case has many details about how Dr. Shingleton works with his staff and patients, and how the provider team focuses on patient care. A key measure of productivity for the surgery center is the time required in the operating room. Shingleton's numbers are impressive as they decrease each year. The business context relates to the particular patients, mostly require cataract or glaucoma surgery and the payer is Medicare/Medicaid, which regulates the price. Yearly decreasing prices make it more difficult for doctors to earn a good income unless they improve their productivity. Other surgeons in the practice do not copy Dr. Shingleton's practices nor use his trained surgical team. The dilemma relates to why his methods do not spread to other doctors and other clinics.

Scoping the situation at the Mega Oil Corporation, a major management-consulting firm, had been the easy part. The firm is seriously behind its best competitors and risks falling further behind unless changes are made to reorganize its worldwide staff functions. Now the more difficult task is identifying and prioritizing the actions to take.

PCH International started out as a sourcing agent of low-priced electronic components from Taiwan and China to the Western world in the mid 1990s, it had evolved to become a provider of comprehensive supply chain solutions to global technology companies by 2007. PCH was designed to address the needs of a complex global technology supply chain landscape. The first section of the case provides an overview of the global technology supply chain in the 2000s; the second section describes the physical, information and capital "flows" in the technology supply chain and the third section discusses how PCH had designed solutions to address the challenges in the three "flows." Customers examples included in the case to illustrate the various supply chain principles.

Individuals enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid, known as dual eligibles, are among the highest-cost beneficiaries in the US. Commonwealth Care Alliance, a small nonprofit insurer and care delivery system in Massachusetts, operated under a public demonstration program designed to provide comprehensive coverage and care for the elderly dual eligible population. Led by Dr. Robert Master, Commonwealth Care Alliance worked with its contracted providers to implement and support a care delivery model that could allow as many members as possible to live independently outside of nursing homes. The case examines Commonwealth Care Alliance's insurance and care delivery approaches amidst a changing policy environment and various resource constraints. This case can be used to teach: Approaches to value-based insurance and care delivery; Insurance and care delivery considerations for underserved, high-cost populations; Evolution and structure of US Medicare and state Medicaid programs and demonstrations; and payer and provider reimbursement models.

Mapleleaf Corporation is a mid-size player in the paper products industry. The firm has recently become aware that growing demand will soon outstrip its present production capacity. The primary objective of this case is to introduce students to the world of capacity planning and optimization.

EURid considers possible market mechanisms to allocate initial domain names within the Internet's newly-created "dot EU." European Union regulations and community norms substantially constrain EURid's approach, preventing the use of the most natural economic mechanisms (such as auctions).

EURid considers possible market mechanisms to allocate initial domain names within the Internet's newly-created "dot EU." European Union regulations and community norms substantially constrain EURid's approach, preventing the use of the most natural economic mechanisms (such as auctions).

In November 2006, Symon Bridle, the newly appointed chief operating officer of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, was thinking about a number of organizational issues that presented challenges to Shangri-La's rapid expansion strategy. There were three major issues at hand: (1) the company was expanding into high-wage economies in Europe and North America; (2) the company was expanding its presence in China--a country where front-line employees were not used to exercising decision-making authority; and (3) newcomers in the Chinese hotel market were poaching Shangri-La's staff and driving up wages in historically low-waged markets. As a COO, Bridle needed to ensure that Shangri-La's signature standards of "Asian Hospitality" were maintained during this expansion.

Home Depot popularized the concept of "do-it-yourself" for customers eager to build, repair, and improve their own homes. Home Depot stores were stocked with a wide range of home-improvement goods and had knowledgeable employees ready to help customers choose the right products, tools, and materials and even explain how to use them. To some extent, Home Depot store managers "did it themselves" as well. For its first 20 years, Home Depot was known for its entrepreneurial spirit and was run rather informally. Store managers, who tended to be experts in home improvement, made their own merchandise-planning decisions and had considerable autonomy in running their stores. Purchasing was also decentralized. As it grew in size, many in the company believed that a more disciplined approach to operations would be important for further growth. In 2000, the company hired Bob Nardelli, a former GE senior executive, to lead the change. As chairman and CEO, Nardelli centralized merchandising and purchasing and brought process discipline to store operations, simplifying and standardizing store processes and introducing Six Sigma quality methodology. Nardelli's changes led to higher profitability. Nevertheless, Home Depot's stock price remained nearly unchanged during his tenure and certain aspects of customer service suffered significantly. These results raise an important question not only for Home Depot, but also for other companies in which employees perform both routine production-related activities and nonroutine customer-service activities: Is there a trade-off between process discipline and customer service? If so, what aspects of customer service?

The chief security officer of TJX Companies Inc. (TJX) faces a dilemma on his first day on the job. The company has discovered in December 2006, a computer intrusion dating back to 2005. There is an ongoing investigation, involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the attacks. The company is also in the middle of several class action law suits over losses suffered by financial institutions due to breaches of customer privacy. The chief security officer has to focus on plugging the loopholes in the company's information technology (IT)security, in the short term, and taking steps to ensure in the long term that the attack does not recur. He also had to get the management of TJX to start looking at IT security not as a technology issue but as a business issue.

Paul Fletcher, the CEO of Actis, a leading private equity investor in emerging markets, is preparing for an executive retreat at which the management team will consider how best to position the firm for the future. Actis could move in a number of different directions, by expanding into new geographies, asset classes, or deal sizes. Choices made along these dimensions all have different implications for the degree of cohesion between the regions and the headquarters in London, the types of funds the firm will raise, and the skills required of employees. One of the final challenges is whether Actis, which has produced a very good track record, even needs to change its business model at this point.

The executive team at Corning has committed to double the rate of new business creation per decade, while at the same time growing the company's current businesses, including glass substrates for LCD displays. Their strategy, built on more than 150 years of successful innovation, is to invent "keystone components" which uniquely enable other companies' products and earn high margins from its proprietary technology. As part of the company's mission to be around for another 150 years, the executive team is also committed to devote considerable resources to basic research "in faith" that it will create new, high-margin businesses that will drive corporate growth in 10-20 years and enable the company to "reinvent" itself, even though they will not be around to reap the benefits of this investment. The executive team must choose how to allocate finite RD&E resources between (1) "pushing" one, or more, of four brand new businesses with considerable potential in the development pipeline to the market sooner; (2) allocating more resources to six new products being launched from existing businesses; or (3) spending more on exploratory research. In making these decisions, the executive team must consider the impact of their decision on not only near-term earnings, but on how it will enable Corning to diversify over the medium to long term in terms of the quality and quantity of its portfolio of new technologies in the development pipeline and new businesses being launched, especially so that it is not overly dependent on sales of a particular business like LCD glass. 

Novartis is a science-based drug company, which has important implications for its business strategy. It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world with over $38B in sales in 2007. Pharmaceuticals account for slightly over $24B of that total. In 2007, corporate R&D spending was $6.43B, or almost 17% of net sales. Novartis executive leaders believe in scientific progress and that large-scale investments in science will therefore result in long-term pay-offs in terms of profits and discoveries that benefit mankind. Novartis' business strategy is closely tied to its research strategy, which emphasizes extensive internal discovery and development capabilities leading to organic growth along with explicit external alliances and collaborations to supplement its core capabilities. Like its competitors, Novartis faces many challenges in terms of moving research from the bench to the bedside.  Five years after undertaking the restructuring of the discovery research organization, CEO Daniel Vasella is pleased with its progress, including many more development projects in the pipeline and new molecular entities. Nevertheless, the company faces a number of challenges, including generic drugs, patent infringements in developing countries, and pricing pressure from governments and health insurers in the United States. Given these challenges, Novartis must decide how much to spend on R&D overall, how to arrive at the right mix between organic growth and external collaboration and in-licensing, and how to measure success when it takes so many years to develop and launch a successful drug.    

Spreadsheet Supplement for Product #'s 602096 and 602097.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Product #'s 602095, 602103 and 602104.

Spreadsheet Supplement for 602098.

When retailers' sales slip, the biggest opportunity to boost profits comes from improving execution. To do that, research shows, managers may actually need to increase staff.