個案總覽

TEKCOM Corporation (TEKCOM) was one of the largest exporters of film-faced plywood (FFP) in Vietnam. The company experienced double-digit growth in its FFP trading business from 2005 to 2011. In 2012, TEKCOM ventured into FFP manufacturing. However, after building strong brand equity in both local and foreign markets as a mid-range FFP producer, TEKCOM faced a major constraint to its growth ambition. Veneer, a key raw material for making FFP, was in short supply in Vietnam. Sourcing veneer from overseas suppliers was expensive. Furthermore, the domestic FFP market was becoming increasingly competitive. An escalation in the company’s orders backlog, due to a severe shortage in veneer, led TEKCOM’s chief executive officer to review his company’s business model and strategy to sustain growth. In June 2017, TEKCOM was considering various options to address the supply shortage and the prospect of market expansion with new products. However, there were major risks associated with all available options.

Kaizen, meaning change for the better in Japanese, is a set of activities directed at improving standardized work, equipment, and procedures for carrying out daily production or other business operations. It was popularized by Toyota as an integral part of its Toyota Production System. This note provides describes some of the underlying practices, and a simple outline for conducting a kaizen event.

In June 2009, the new chief executive officer at the National University Hospital in Singapore had serious concerns about the hospital’s prolonged emergency department boarding time—the time between an emergency doctor’s decision to admit a patient and the patient’s occupation of a hospital bed. He knew that a prolonged boarding time was one of the leading factors contributing to emergency department overcrowding, which in turn hindered the delivery of high-quality medical care and compromised patient outcomes. The chief executive officer needed to decide what strategy the National University Hospital should adopt to reduce the prolonged emergency department boarding time and how the hospital should execute such a strategy.

The president and vice-president of BonaVista Pools Limited (BonaVista) needed to decide what to do for the upcoming pool production season. They received notice that the two employees in charge of overseeing the most crucial step of the pool production process were going to be unavailable for the upcoming period. Anticipating a busy season, the president and vice-president needed to decide whether to hire a new nozzle operator, promote their junior nozzle operator, or outsource this crucial step in the pool production process. They needed to look at the financial and operational implications of each option and ensure they maintained the premier standard of BonaVista set by their father.

The president and vice-president of BonaVista Pools Limited (BonaVista) needed to decide what to do for the upcoming pool production season. They received notice that the two employees in charge of overseeing the most crucial step of the pool production process were going to be unavailable for the upcoming period. Anticipating a busy season, the president and vice-president needed to decide whether to hire a new nozzle operator, promote their junior nozzle operator, or outsource this crucial step in the pool production process. They needed to look at the financial and operational implications of each option and ensure they maintained the premier standard of BonaVista set by their father.

By early 2018, Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), one of the world's most valuable companies and the largest online retailer in the world, had grown dramatically since its beginnings in 1994. The company that had started as an online bookseller now sold merchandise and digital content in more than 30 categories, including electronics, clothing, books, furniture, and streaming music and video. It sold its own products and listed products for sale by over two million third-party sellers. It provided on-demand cloud-computing services and offered fulfillment and shipping services to businesses, and it had recently entered grocery retailing through its purchase of Whole Foods Market. With 2017 shipping costs that exceeded $21 billion, the company was working to establish greater control over its supply chain network and capabilities. Amazon was selling a huge variety of products in many formats, and the chief executive officer needed to determine how to structure the company's supply chain in order to support its strategy and growth objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Amazon need as its business model continued to evolve?

By early 2018, Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), one of the world’s most valuable companies and the largest online retailer in the world, had grown dramatically since its beginnings in 1994. The company that had started as an online bookseller now sold merchandise and digital content in more than 30 categories, including electronics, clothing, books, furniture, and streaming music and video. It sold its own products and listed products for sale by over two million third-party sellers. It provided on-demand cloud-computing services and offered fulfillment and shipping services to businesses, and it had recently entered grocery retailing through its purchase of Whole Foods Market. With 2017 shipping costs that exceeded $21 billion, the company was working to establish greater control over its supply chain network and capabilities. Amazon was selling a huge variety of products in many formats, and the chief executive officer needed to determine how to structure the company’s supply chain in order to support its strategy and growth objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Amazon need as its business model continued to evolve?

This case focuses on the genesis and development of the open innovation unit at BT, the strategic value of the unit, and its operating model. As business environment becomes increasingly dynamic and firms are pressured to achieve faster innovation rates, there may be accompanying shifts in the way they pursue innovation. This case illustrates the challenges that this poses to large corporations as well as the key activities the open innovation unit engages in to deal with them. In particular, it must manage relationships with various stakeholders to leverage the value of matching external ideas and technologies with internal resources and capabilities. The case poses the question: Should the open innovation unit fully incubate some ideas, instead of always seeking partnership with commitment from a customer-facing unit?

Bloom & Grow is a regional distributor in Asia of maternity, baby, and children's products. The company was founded in 2004 by a mother who was having problems finding reliable, high-quality products for herself and her first baby. The company grew from a one-person venture into a pan-Asian enterprise with five warehouses.

Bloom & Grow is a regional distributor in Asia of maternity, baby, and children's products. The company was founded in 2004 by a mother who was having problems finding reliable, high-quality products for herself and her first baby. The company grew from a one-person venture into a pan-Asian enterprise with five warehouses.

Since its founding eight years earlier, Hidrovias do Brasil ("Hidrovias"), an integrated logistics provider serving corporate customers exporting products from South America via the Atlantic Ocean, had grown to 900 employees and $253 million in annual revenues. Hidrovias was founded by the Brazilian private equity firm, Pátria Investments, who had built the business from the ground up, forging and nurturing relationships with customers, investors, government entities, and suppliers. As Bruno Serapiao, Hidrovias's CEO pondered next steps for the company, he considered: What had been the key drivers of Hidrovias's success to date? What were the major challenges? And, what was the best path for the company going forward?

This case uses the example of a clinic with a single doctor (Dr. Zhivago) and a single nurse-receptionist (Ms. Celine) to introduce students to business analytics and the idea of psychology of queues. At the clinic, the previous nurse, Mr. Tao, retired, and the new nurse, Ms. Celine, is even more efficient. However, Dr. Zhivago hears an increasing number of complaints of long waiting times from patients, despite the fact that the patients' average time-per-visit meets the industrial standard. Why do these patients complain? Representative data of patient arrivals and service times are provided for Ms. Celine and Mr. Tao.

Student spreadsheet for case NTU187

Kiessling Spedition (Kiessling) was an international operating forwarder in Regenstauf (Eastern Bavaria), Germany, and a member of a large in-night express network. In April 2017, the company faced the problem of losing one of its major consigners. The consigner was a large wholesaler of automotive parts for the utility sector and had been feeding high volumes into Kiessling's in-night system. This cancellation caused the volume and use of most of Kiessling's in-night tours to drop significantly, by as much as 40 per cent in volume and 26 per cent in stops. Since the distribution costs were almost fully fixed, the contribution margin of all affected tours decreased. In order to adapt the Kiessling in-night operations to overcome this turmoil, the operations manager and his team needed to choose among several alternatives, and then make a plan to implement the solution quickly.

Student Spreadsheet for product 9B18D014.

This case describes the operations of a fictitious company that processes Cranberries. The case contains data that allows students to calculate the bottleneck stage in production, and to evaluate alternative investment options for increasing cranberry processing capacity.

In 2017, Equuleus Car Sharing Inc. (ECS) was a relatively new player in the rental car industry, with annual revenues approaching US$100 million. ECS had experienced significant growth since its founding in 2014 due to its focus on low prices and a mix of high-demand vehicle types-specifically, minivans, sport utility vehicles, sedans, and economy cars. ECS management wished to examine the opportunity to purchase new vehicles through financing versus the traditional method of paying cash for dramatically expanding the fleet size. The goal was to develop a fleet purchasing strategy that maximized the present value of net income.

Kamaths Ourtimes Ice Creams Pvt. Ltd., a company located in Mumbai, India, manufactured and distributed ice cream under the brand Natural Ice Cream. The company specialized in using natural flavours in its products, a fact that helped it carve a niche for itself among health-conscious customers. In April 2017, after witnessing great demand for its ice cream across the country, the company's board of directors asked the director of operations to draft a plan to expand manufacturing capacity. As his first step towards this expansion, the director wanted to study the current operations and address any inefficiencies. One aspect that caught his attention was the recent delay in product delivery. Based on his experience, he did not see the company's capacity to fulfill current orders as the reason for delays. Therefore, he decided that the problem was related to the process flow. He would have to find ways to streamline the process to reduce or eliminate all delays in delivery.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Google's new cross-industry survey about key performance indicators (KPIs) asked senior executives to explain how they and their organizations are using KPIs in the digital era. The results shed light on the tensions and contradictions companies face when using KPIs, demonstrate the many ways advanced use of KPIs can benefit organizations, and offer steps executives can take to make the most of KPIs going forward.

This case focuses on Dell's efforts to develop an open-source, scalable, and cost-effective supply chain capable of delivering ocean plastics waste to its production facilities, and potentially to those of partnering companies through a consortium. Piyush Bhargava, vice president of global operations at Dell and leader of Dell's Ocean Plastics Initiative, must deliver a strategic plan for how to proceed with the initiative but has three primary challenges: (1) how to deliver "additionality", (2) how to operationalize an ocean plastics supply chain at scale, and (3) how Dell should approach developing a consortium to ensure meaningful demand for the material. The case presents scientific information on the causes, scale, and impact of the ocean plastics problem and provides background on Dell's involvement in other sustainable packaging initiatives. Students will learn why Dell chose this cause and how it came to be a leading initiative within the company. The case is based on a 2017 Tauber Institute for Global Operations (University of Michigan) summer internship project.