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The case recounts a significant attempt at social transformation through a simple mechanism of providing cooking gas to the marginalised in society. Targeting about 80 million BPL (below the poverty line) households in India that still used dung cakes, firewood, and coal as the primary fuel for cooking, the government conceived the Ujjwala scheme to replace these traditional fuels with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), a clean fuel. The scheme had the potential to achieve major social transformation through women empowerment. The women would have more time to engage in economic activities and improve the health of households. This scheme would particularly improve the health of women who were directly affected by the polluting fuels. Launched on May 1, 2016, the scheme was very successful in terms of the number of households covered, as the target group across the country enthusiastically embraced it. By January 2018, the scheme had already covered over 30 million families. While reviewing the scheme's progress, the Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas-responsible for its execution-realised that several key decisions regarding Ujjwala would require careful resolution to ensure that the social benefits from the scheme were sustained.

Walmart miscalculated when it entered China using its "Every Day Low Prices" strategy. It struggled with value proposition, local regulations, staff incentive schemes, logistics, and significant economic and cultural differences between regions. After two decades it developed successful operations in China. With Chinese led disruption labelled as "New retail," that meant full integration between online and offline commerce, Walmart had to ensure its continued success in this new environment.

This case set follows Eric and Holly Nelson, founders of Special Hope Network, a nonprofit organization providing holistic therapy services for children with intellectual disabilities and their families in Lusaka, Zambia. Eric, a pastor, and Holly, a special needs teacher, had previously adopted three children with Down syndrome and moved to Zambia to form this enterprise. They worked hard to overcome systemic obstacles to their mission, including a cultural bias against bringing children with intellectual disabilities out in public; a feeling that the family was to blame for the child's disabilities; a scarcity of qualified therapists; and a variety of economic and regulatory factors. Having originally relied on donations from US-based friends and family, they needed to finance their therapy centers, which were targeted to low-income Zambian families, and were highly subsidized. Options they explored included fundraising with local businesses, "child sponsoring" on their website, grant writing, teaching other educators and nonprofits, and tourism fundraising. This A case takes place in 2012, when the Nelsons are considering opening a for-profit resource center, marketed to middle- and upper-class Zambians. It explores the viability of this option, and asks, "Does a for-profit resource center fit with our mission to serve the neediest children?" This case is suitable for an undergraduate, graduate, or executive education class on nonprofit management or strategy. The focus is the alignment of a firm's activities, and whether they support its core mission-which can sometimes have a different answer depending on whether the firm is for profit or nonprofit.

This case set follows Eric and Holly Nelson, founders of Special Hope Network, a nonprofit organization providing holistic therapy services for children with intellectual disabilities and their families in Lusaka, Zambia. Eric, a pastor, and Holly, a special needs teacher, had previously adopted three children with Down syndrome and moved to Zambia to form this enterprise. They worked hard to overcome systemic obstacles to their mission, including a cultural bias against bringing children with intellectual disabilities out in public; a feeling that the family was to blame for the child's disabilities; a scarcity of qualified therapists; and a variety of economic and regulatory factors. Having originally relied on donations from US-based friends and family, they needed to finance their therapy centers, which were targeted to low-income Zambian families, and were highly subsidized. Options they explored included fundraising with local businesses, "child sponsoring" on their website, grant writing, teaching other educators and nonprofits, and tourism fundraising. In the B and C cases, which take place between 2018 and 2019, it is revealed that while the for-profit resource center did provide a number of valuable intangible benefits, it was ultimately not profitable. This case is suitable for an undergraduate, graduate, or executive education class on nonprofit management or strategy. The focus is the alignment of a firm's activities, and whether they support its core mission-which can sometimes have a different answer depending on whether the firm is for profit or nonprofit.

This case set follows Eric and Holly Nelson, founders of Special Hope Network, a nonprofit organization providing holistic therapy services for children with intellectual disabilities and their families in Lusaka, Zambia. Eric, a pastor, and Holly, a special needs teacher, had previously adopted three children with Down syndrome and moved to Zambia to form this enterprise. They worked hard to overcome systemic obstacles to their mission, including a cultural bias against bringing children with intellectual disabilities out in public; a feeling that the family was to blame for the child's disabilities; a scarcity of qualified therapists; and a variety of economic and regulatory factors. Having originally relied on donations from US-based friends and family, they needed to finance their therapy centers, which were targeted to low-income Zambian families, and were highly subsidized. Options they explored included fundraising with local businesses, "child sponsoring" on their website, grant writing, teaching other educators and nonprofits, and tourism fundraising. In the B and C cases, which take place between 2018 and 2019, it is revealed that while the for-profit resource center did provide a number of valuable intangible benefits, it was ultimately not profitable. This case is suitable for an undergraduate, graduate, or executive education class on nonprofit management or strategy. The focus is the alignment of a firm's activities, and whether they support its core mission-which can sometimes have a different answer depending on whether the firm is for profit or nonprofit.

Increasingly, multinational corporations (MNCs) are pledging to procure the materials and services they need from companies committed to fair labor practices and environmental protections. But the reality is that their suppliers--especially those at low levels of the chain--often violate sustainability standards, exposing MNCs to serious financial and social risks. To explore this problem--and identify solutions--the authors studied the supply networks of three MNCs deemed to be sustainability leaders. These companies engage in behaviors that are worth emulating; for example, they have established long-term sustainability goals, and they try to cascade good practices all the way down to lower-tier suppliers, using a combination of direct, indirect, industrywide, and global strategies. But all MNCs have more work to do to develop sustainable supply networks. They must emphasize social and environmental responsibility, along with economic considerations, at every level of the supply chain. They must give their procurement officers better training and incentives to pursue supplier sustainability. And to encourage widespread dissemination of best practices, they need more direct contact with the procurement people at their first-tier suppliers.

Spreadsheet supplement for case OIT120.

Health care management requires careful planning for efficient operations, in an environment where technology, best practices, and patient demands continue to change rapidly. This case study presents an operations management decision at a large academic medical center in response to falling demand for cardiac catheterization (CATH) procedures and growing demand for electrophysiology (EP) procedures, and requires students to consider all angles of the decision. Merging two currently separate but clinically similar labs into a contiguous physical space would allow for more efficient scheduling and operational efficiency in the shared space, as well as affect clinical outcomes, and patient and staff satisfaction. In this case study, students analyze the operational decisions required to plan the merger of the two labs to achieve operational, financial, and clinical hospital objectives, using a dataset too large to analyze manually. The case asks students to create compelling visual representations of these data, use a discrete event simulation (DES) model, and present their results as if to hospital leadership.

In October 2018, the owner of Sam's Pizzeria (Sam's) in Orillia, Ontario, needed to determine how he should staff his business to keep up with an increase in demand on Halloween. Halloween had often been a source of frustration, as Sam's struggled to keep up with demand on that day. Providing customers with good-quality pizza and fast delivery was critical to Sam's success. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past, the owner knew that he would need a better plan to staff his pizzeria if Halloween were to be any different this year.

In October 2018, the owner of Sam’s Pizzeria (Sam’s) in Orillia, Ontario, needed to determine how he should staff his business to keep up with an increase in demand on Halloween. Halloween had often been a source of frustration, as Sam's struggled to keep up with demand on that day. Providing customers with good-quality pizza and fast delivery was critical to Sam’s success. Not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the past, the owner knew that he would need a better plan to staff his pizzeria if Halloween were to be any different this year.

Rebecca Banquette, a recently hired executive coach and Lean consultant at a staffing firm in the health care industry, has experienced a change in her Lean management philosophy and approach. Previously, she focused heavily on Lean's technical process-improvement aspects, but after a period of personal exploration and growth, she has decided to focus first and primarily on the development of people. In this case, Banquette explains and reflects on her methods for utilizing Lean tools-including the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle, the A3 structured problem-solving process, and gemba walks-to create standard work in developing leaders. She also uses a holistic framework to provide focus to her development activities, including helping others ask the right questions and building personal qualities such as humility and courage. In doing so, she commits to being the type of coach who refrains from providing answers or direct advice. Instead, she presents new information and ideas and then supports her executives by asking questions designed to build self-reflection skills. This case is both a leadership-development story and a creative application of Lean tools in a context that supports the development of robust people. Just as a process is described as robust when it can accept a wide range of inputs and produce a consistent output, people can also be described as robust when they respond flexibly to competing and ever-changing circumstances and still produce consistent results. By utilizing the concept of standard work in a leadership-development setting, we codify the process of developing people with an intentional, Lean-based framework, and we emphasize the critical, primary importance of robust people in the overall operations of an organization.

Founded in 2015 by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, and Greg Schwartz, StockX was an online platform where users could buy and sell unworn luxury and limited-edition sneakers. Sneaker resale prices often fluctuated over time based on supply and demand, creating a robust secondary market that bore similarities to the stock market. Inspired by these similarities, StockX's co-founders created a secondary platform that tracked sneaker resale prices over time and that emphasized authenticity, anonymity, and transparency. In 2017, StockX began to experiment with ways to expand from the secondary market into the primary market, using a new type of online auction known as an initial product offering (IPO). Based on the results of its first IPOs, was StockX on the right track with its strategy to expand into the primary market?

Spreadsheet supplement to case 620062

It is June 2019, and Lillian Lim of Mackor Consultancy, a third-party consultancy in Singapore, is at the newest warehouse of her client, KYY Group, a major third-party logistics provider. Headquartered in Singapore, KYY's business activities span Asia. In 2013, the company started construction of a US$200 million logistics hub. With two million square feet of warehouse space and a million square feet of office space, it would house the KYY Group's headquarters, as well as its research and warehousing facilities. The new logistics hub was due to open in late 2019, and would comprise the latest supply-chain and logistics automation technology. Lim's company was hired to do a study on the improvements that could be made to increase the profitability of KYY's warehouse operations at the hub. To do this, she needs to understand the expected pattern of supply and demand for goods at the warehouse, and the current process of storage and retrieval of inventory. She has to make a presentation on her preliminary findings in two weeks' time to KYY Group's senior management.

It is June 2019, and Lillian Lim of Mackor Consultancy, a third-party consultancy in Singapore, is at the newest warehouse of her client, KYY Group, a major third-party logistics provider. Headquartered in Singapore, KYY's business activities span Asia. In 2013, the company started construction of a US$200 million logistics hub. With two million square feet of warehouse space and a million square feet of office space, it would house the KYY Group's headquarters, as well as its research and warehousing facilities. The new logistics hub was due to open in late 2019, and would comprise the latest supply-chain and logistics automation technology. Lim's company was hired to do a study on the improvements that could be made to increase the profitability of KYY's warehouse operations at the hub. To do this, she needs to understand the expected pattern of supply and demand for goods at the warehouse, and the current process of storage and retrieval of inventory. She has to make a presentation on her preliminary findings in two weeks' time to KYY Group's senior management.

Spreadsheet supplement for case SMU562.

Spreadsheet supplement for case SMU562.

This case is based on Biocon Group's (NSE: BIOCON, an Indian biopharmaceutical company) R&D unit and fully owned subsidiary - Biocon Research Limited (BRL). This case involves study of R&D management processes followed within the company and the imminent decision on the organizational & structural change within R&D unit at the wake of changing business contexts and aspiration of the company. The case outlines the overall environment of the bio-pharmaceutical industry across the world and in India, and introduces readers to the events leading to the organization change and the execution of change management by the corporate leadership. The case captures the transition of Biocon, from an enzyme manufacturer to the technologically challenging space of biopharmaceuticals. This transition provides scope for learning various aspects of organization development such as building organizational and technology capability, creating processes and structures that support R&D initiatives, managing and measuring a portfolio of varied product development projects, and developing an innovative organizational culture.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF) is a not-for-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered at Bengaluru, India. Since its inception in 2000, TAPF has been working to provide fresh and nutritious meals to children on every single school day and in 2019 catered to about 1.76 million children from 15,024 schools across 12 states in India daily. TAPF's Vrindavan kitchen (TAPF VRN), located in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, has been operational since 2004, and now caters to about 140,000 children in 2,032 schools daily. The uniqueness of this kitchen is that it has both rice and roti (chapati) based meals, making it different and more complex to manage than their other kitchens, most of whom are either only rice or only roti based. The case describes the complete range of activities: procurement, pre-processing, cooking, and finally packaging and dispatch, at this kitchen. The richness of the data helps to generate discussions around the material planning, procurement, and production planning activities at this kitchen.