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JD, China's second largest e-commerce company by gross merchandise volume (GMV) after Alibaba, had expanded rapidly from 2012 to 2016. When the company celebrated its 13th birthday in 2017, Richard Liu, its founder, deliberated on the company's growth strategies. The landscape of China's e-commerce market had changed drastically in recent years. The growth in the e-commerce market had declined significantly. Furthermore, the advancement of AI and big data was turning shopping into a boundaryless experience-consumers could purchase products tailored to their preferences anywhere and anytime. Finally, JD's rival, Alibaba, had made rapid moves to improve its logistics capabilities and expanded aggressively in the offline market. Liu must decide how JD should compete and how to expand the company's offline strategy.

It was July 2017 when the co-founders of Fitpass Business Ventures Private Ltd. (Fitpass), an online platform providing passes to fitness establishments in the Delhi-National Capital Region, were reflecting on the need for continuous innovation to stay relevant to their users. Launched in June 2015, the company intended to satisfy the unmet market need for flexible workout options at an affordable price for fitness-conscious Indian youth. The company's application, FITPASS, had been downloaded 100,000 times, and the company had gained 60,000 registered users and created a partner network of 1,500 fitness establishments in the region. Generating 100 per cent growth in month-on-month revenue, the company was among the leading platforms in this region. However, the online marketplace was becoming crowded with look-alike competitors, and the founders faced some tough questions: How could the company sustain its position in the current market? Was the company ready to move into other similar markets using the current business model and innovative capabilities?

The factory manager of John Deere Reman, located in Edmonton, Canada, was preparing for a meeting in September 2017, with the general manager of Global Reman Operations and Marketing at the company's head office in Springfield, Missouri. John Deere’s remanufacturing operations had been steadily improving over the last decade. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss opportunities for changes to John Deere’s remanufacturing operation that would provide value to the company, improve customer service, and support the company’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

Student spreadsheet for case W18199.

In September 2016, a senior consultant at the Indore campus of the Central Institute of Management and Consulting (CIMC) was busy preparing some documents for a meeting on a transportation problem the organization was facing. CIMC Indore's chief operating officer had requested his assistance to resolve the transport department's issues. Management was incurring substantial yearly costs for maintenance related to the drivers that operated the various vehicles of the organizations. There was also a need to rationalize the workload of the drivers to avoid dissonance among employees. Following his meeting with the chief operating officer, the senior consultant saw an opportunity to reduce the annual cost of drivers, while addressing some of the dissatisfaction that was present among drivers concerning their schedules and workload.

Facing operational constraints due to helicopter engines with sub-optimal power during hot weather at high altitudes, the program manager for an air-ambulance operator must plan for a decision process to consider upgrading the engines of any, many, or all of his program's seven helicopters. Long before putting the decision before his parent company's executives or board of directors, he needs to develop lists of relevant quantitative variables and what's known about them, qualitative factors and considerations, and stakeholders and their interests, all in order to methodically structure a process to better advance conversations with his colleagues toward a more efficient and effective outcome. Presented as a qualitative task of decision preparation, this case focuses on the early steps of rational decision-making processes, such as "define the problem" and "identify the criteria," without going further toward a decision recommendation. Intended for the first weeks of managerial-decision making courses, the case distinguishes the value of comprehensively considering the set-up of complex decision processes as pre-requisite to subsequent steps. Especially for students who see "making a decision" as actions taken with calculators and spreadsheets, this case is intended to demonstrate the value of prior steps in decision processes that include complexity, uncertainty, and colleagues who must be "on the same page" along the way. Further, the vivid overlap of the healthcare industry with aviation operations is intended to heighten student interest, with contextual information on how the medical-transport industry operates.

In the fall of 2013, Anna and Jack Oleson, the owners of a full-service bridal shop in one of Michigan's Upper Peninsula's small communities were preparing for their annual six-hour drive to Chicago for the National Bridal Market. They would be making merchandise buying decisions for the upcoming season. However, this year's trip would be very different because the Olesons were reevaluating previous suppliers and potentially selecting new ones. In operation for 23 years, the shop prided itself on offering a full range of services, including alterations by a full-time seamstress. Because brides typically placed special orders for wedding gowns - after seeking consultation and trying on samples in the store - rather than buying them "off the rack," receiving timely and reliable deliveries from suppliers was critical. While vendors' corporate headquarters were located in the U.S., their gowns were often manufactured overseas, primarily in China. After incidents of "miscommunication" regarding deliveries, delivery failures, and suppliers' inflexibility regarding minimum order quantities for samples (i.e., unwillingness to grant concessions to smaller shops), the owners needed to re-conceive their buying criteria and sourcing strategies. To add complexity, the growing population of millennial brides (those turning 27 years before 2030) were brand- and quality-conscious, sought unique products, and increasingly turned to online retailers to make purchases. The case provides a general overview of retail operations within a small apparel (bridal and formalwear) shop, as well as insights into its market and suppliers' policies and operations, and challenges associated with online competitors.

Several white goods companies are grappling with issues such as short product life-cycle and high item obsolescence rates. This case, using the example of a leading white goods manufacturer ─ ULTRON, analyzes several strategies to overcome item obsolescence, standardize put-away and picking operations and overcome challenges with low picker efficiency at white-goods warehouses that are operating without warehouse management software.

In late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and CEO of the fast growing online pet food and pet products retailer Chewy.com, has to make a "bet the company decision"-whether to keep working with Chewy's third-party logistics (3PL) provider to fulfill customer orders, or whether to take this critical function in-house. Cohen worries that the company's 3PL will not be able to serve Chewy's customers as it continues to grow, and reaching scale is essential to making the company's business model work, and to hitting the aggressive growth target that he has set of becoming a $500 million revenue company by 2018. However, some board members are concerned, and have suggested that Cohen slow growth and leave order fulfillment to the 3PL, as Cohen and the executive team are not operations experts; they are customer service experts, and that should be their focus. Cohen sees four possible paths for Chewy: stick with its current 3PL and slow down growth; add another 3PL to the mix to support Chewy as it scales; stay with its current 3PL and build out a fulfillment center in a new market to "test it out"; or fully "insource" order fulfilment, and open a fulfilment center as quickly as possible. Which path should Cohen and Chewy's board choose?

Cohen and Chewy's other board members decided to fully insource order fulfilment, and commenced building an order fulfilment center near its 3PL partner's facility. As soon as the 3PL learned that Chewy would be managing its own order fulfilment, however, it decided to triple what it charged Chewy to fulfill each order. What should Chewy do?

This case provides the opportunity for a comprehensive analysis in a service operations strategy course. It touches on subjects including the customer value proposition, profitability, employee management, customer management, robust people versus robust process, queue management, and staffing models. This case can be used as a basis for discussing the ""Four Truths"" from Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business, 6th ed. (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2012). The Four Truths are (1) you can't be good at everything, (2) someone has to pay for it, (3) you must manage your employees, and (4) you must manage your customers. Students are asked to decide the necessary service strategy and operational changes as Schindler Elevator Corporation decides how to use current trends in the internet of things.

This case describes Ekol, an intermodal transportation and logistics company, and how it manages capacity planning. Its busiest routes linked motor vehicle assemblers in Germany and Turkey with many of their parts suppliers, but it had also developed key links in fast-fashion supply chains. It used combinations of land, short-sea, and rail routes to provide different levels of service. The challenge was maximizing utilization of its trucks and trailers, especially on key bottleneck links, in the face of unbalanced traffic. To address the issue Ekol developed a consolidation center in Turkey and a cross-dock deconsolidation center in Germany, its largest market. As Chairman Ahmet Musul and his team looked at ways to squeeze out more capacity, they reconsidered their planning model and whether they should build more consolidation/deconsolidation centers to optimize costs and wring out more efficiency in its operations.

In December 2014, Dr. Anthony Furlan, chair of the Department of Neurology at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center (UH), faced a mandate from the hospital's executive leadership team. Specifically, all UH departments were directed to take steps within six months to reduce the waiting time for outpatient appointments-measured as the time to first available outpatient appointment-to no more than 15 days. For Furlan and his colleagues in neurology, achieving this target was a significant challenge, as the department's current time to first available appointment was 93 days. The case considers several alternatives for reducing waiting time in outpatient neurology without increasing the total clinical staff. The case allows students to evaluate opportunities for expanding the effective capacity of a complex service operation and to understand the tradeoffs between customer service and labor utilization.

In February 2016, Kathy Hannun--a project leader at X, Alphabet Inc.'s so-called "moonshot factory--had to prepare a recommendation for the senior leadership of X regarding the future of Foghorn, a project she was leading to develop a carbon-neutral process for converting sea water into fuel. Recognizing the blueprint for projects at X--(1) addressing a huge problem with a (2) radical solution using (3) breakthrough technology--Hannun had to decide whether to recommend killing the project. Despite the technical feasibility of the Foghorn process, its expected cost per gallon of fuel produced was signficiantly higher than the established "kill metric"--the maximum unit cost that Hannun and colleagues had set for continuing the project. The case provides an opportunity to examine the management of radical innovation and the challenges associated with assessing early stage ideas. Topics covered include the importance of experimentation and failure as well as the management of opportunity costs in solving large problems.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 618712.

Instructor Spreadsheet for 8B18D005.

Student Spreadsheet for product 9B18D005.

In September 2016, a senior consultant at the Indore campus of the Central Institute of Management and Consulting (CIMC) was busy preparing some documents for a meeting on a transportation problem the organization was facing. CIMC Indore’s chief operating officer had requested his assistance to resolve the transport department’s issues. Management was incurring substantial yearly costs for maintenance related to the drivers that operated the various vehicles of the organizations. There was also a need to rationalize the workload of the drivers to avoid dissonance among employees. Following his meeting with the chief operating officer, the senior consultant saw an opportunity to reduce the annual cost of drivers, while addressing some of the dissatisfaction that was present among drivers concerning their schedules and workload.

On July 7, 2015, a power fault during the evening commute led to a system-wide disruption on SMRT, Singapore's heavily used mass rapid transit lines. Train service on both lines was shut down for more than two hours, affecting more than 413,000 commuters. The public was outraged at the scale of the breakdown and how ineffectively it was handled. Detailed investigations revealed the breakdown to be a result of maintenance lapses, and SMRT was criticized for its failure to provide clear and timely information and instructions to passengers. Following the breakdown, the company embarked on a service recovery process encompassing various new initiatives. This case illustrates the tensions SMRT faced during and after the breakdown, and its journey to recover the public's confidence in is transit services.

When deciding where to locate a new facility, a firm needs to consider the financial health of the municipality where its activities will take place. Unless it sites its facility in a financially viable community, a firm is putting a substantial investment at risk. Despite the importance of this issue, many firms pay insufficient attention to a municipality's financial condition. Instead, they focus on matters such as the tax rate, the quality of the school system, or the absence of regulatory constraints. All of these features are important, but unless a municipality is financially healthy, they can evaporate before a company has attained its expected return on investment. There are 5 financial statements and 10 financial ratios that can be used to create a financial health template, which can help a firm to assess a municipality's financial strength, or its counterpart financial weakness. The template goes beyond the debt-repayment focus of credit rating agencies to matters such as financial autonomy, cash flows, and borrowing capacity. We use data from three cities-Barcelona, Dublin, and Detroit (pre- and post-bankruptcy)-to demonstrate the template's ability to facilitate comparisons among cities that are in different countries and that use different accounting systems.