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The chief operating officer (CEO) at Cambridge Cooling Systems (CCS), an industrial cooling system manufacturer, has been asked for his recommendations on CCS’s plants in Canada and Mexico. The company has had a reversal in its strategic plan in the past year and is shifting from a focus on growth to looking for operating efficiencies. CCS’s global plants are running below full capacity, and opportunity exists to reduce costs through the consolidation of operations. The current focus is on Canada and Mexico, and the CEO is exploring moving custom work from Canada to Mexico, where labour and overhead rates are lower. The challenge for the CEO is to consider the implications of such a move. He needs to determine if it is economically preferable to move production to Mexico, and consider the implications of making changes to CCS’s operations strategy.

The chief operating officer (CEO) at Cambridge Cooling Systems (CCS), an industrial cooling system manufacturer, has been asked for his recommendations on CCS's plants in Canada and Mexico. The company has had a reversal in its strategic plan in the past year and is shifting from a focus on growth to looking for operating efficiencies. CCS's global plants are running below full capacity, and opportunity exists to reduce costs through the consolidation of operations. The current focus is on Canada and Mexico, and the CEO is exploring moving custom work from Canada to Mexico, where labour and overhead rates are lower. The challenge for the CEO is to consider the implications of such a move. He needs to determine if it is economically preferable to move production to Mexico, and consider the implications of making changes to CCS's operations strategy.

In April 2016, the owner of Apoorva Mess (Apoorva) in Manipal, India, wwanted to open a full-service economical restaurant to reach out to customers, beat the competition, improve his sales, and fulfill his dream of serving quality food at affordable rates to the lower middle class. He was facing a dilemma over selecting the best location for establishing his new restaurant, knowing that the wrong choice would spell disaster for his business in the long run. A number of conflicting constraints were making it difficult for him to come to a decision. He wanted to follow a systematic approach to pinpoint the final location.

Student spreadsheet for case W17644.

In October 2010, Ira Pittelman, lead producer of the Broadway musical American Idiot, had to evaluate one week's grosses from when star musician, Billie Joe Armstrong, was put into the show in New York City. The rock star had been enthusiastic about filling in for an actor in the musical based on an album by his band, Green Day. Audiences had also been enthusiastic, and revenues for the play were up. The producer had to determine whether Armstrong was the source of the increased revenue and, if so, how much his performance had contributed. He needed to determine how to respond should Armstrong offer to act in the musical again. Should he accept such an offer? How much compensation should he offer the star?

Student spreadsheet for case W17648.

Student spreadsheet for case W17638.

On June 1, 2016 a student was preparing for a summer job with Agarwal Automobiles, a vehicle fuel station owned by his father. The student had taken courses that covered supply chain management, including inventory management and forecasting. His father had suggested that, as a summer project, the student examine the fuel station’s retail inventory management practices with the intention of replacing the current simple rules with a more rational and complex planning model. The student needed some ideas to use as a guide toward a better ordering policy. The available data for the previous six months suggested that the company held an average ending inventory of ?2.1 million worth of fuel products to maintain average daily sales of ?0.52 million. The challenge was to reduce the inventory levels, while maintaining a high customer service level in fuel sales.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B17D016.

In 2016, the supply chain director of B-Kay Tech, a multinational company headquartered in Belgium, had devised a logistics innovation project based on collaborative shipping, through which partner companies' shipments could be proactively bundled in the same transport-without traditional, reactive third-party groups. With this system, any available space in one company's transport facility could be utilized to transport shipments for the other company, reducing the overall number of trucks used and positively impacting greenhouse gas emissions. For this collaboration, the director had identified a potential partner in WARE-TOUCH, a U.K.-based multinational company that produced and distributed everyday consumer goods throughout Europe and the Middle East. The supply chain director at B-Kay Tech had to propose a gainsharing mechanism to convince WARE-TOUCH that a collaboration between the two companies would have been beneficial.

On June 1, 2016 a student was preparing for a summer job with Agarwal Automobiles, a vehicle fuel station owned by his father. The student had taken courses that covered supply chain management, including inventory management and forecasting. His father had suggested that, as a summer project, the student examine the fuel station's retail inventory management practices with the intention of replacing the current simple rules with a more rational and complex planning model. The student needed some ideas to use as a guide toward a better ordering policy. The available data for the previous six months suggested that the company held an average ending inventory of ₹2.1 million worth of fuel products to maintain average daily sales of ₹0.52 million. The challenge was to reduce the inventory levels, while maintaining a high customer service level in fuel sales.

Networking can be incredibly effective, with research suggesting that people who receive training in the field are more likely to receive promotions and top evaluations. Yet many people misunderstand the term, thinking it means attending an occasional cocktail party or posting comments on Facebook. The investment model of networking, by contrast, approaches the creation of social capital as an investor would tend to a portfolio. In this case students examine the principals of networking like an investor through the lenses of three career professionals who haven't yet reached their networking potential.

The case examines how Marriott should respond to the potential threats from new home-sharing platforms and the rise of on-line travel agencies. In 2017 Marriott was the largest hotel chain, with more than one million rooms and 7% of worldwide room supply. In the previous decade the growing ubiquity of internet-based commerce had facilitated the rise of technology platforms such as Expedia and Airbnb. The case enables students to explore the forces that might lead to industry transformation and the appropriate response strategies of a large incumbent.

In July 2017, Dr. Brian M. Alexander, president and CEO of the AGILE Research Foundation, was preparing to launch a new type of clinical trial-an adaptive platform trial-to study potential therapies for glioblastoma (GBM), an aggressive form of brain cancer. Alexander believed that the standard way in which new cancer drugs were tested-the traditional randomized controlled trial (RCT)-was limited in many ways. While statistically rigorous and still considered the "gold standard" in clinical research, traditional RCTs were time-consuming, costly, and limited to testing just one new drug at a time. Adaptive platform trials, by contrast, facilitated simultaneously studying multiple therapies for a given disease and promised a number of efficiency improvements. They also used statistical techniques to allow more patients to access promising therapies. As such, they had the potential to fundamentally change the clinical research process, making clinical trials for new cancer drugs more efficient, more accessible to patients, and more ambitious in scope. For the past three years, Alexander had been working closely with a group of like-minded oncologists, statisticians, and clinical trial strategists to design an adaptive platform trial for GBM in the hopes of identifying effective therapies more quickly. By mid-2017, Alexander and his colleagues had completed a master protocol for the trial. But now the research team faced several design and operational challenges as they prepared for the trial's launch. Most pressing, how should Alexander and his colleagues finance the trial?

The mathematical relationships predicting average waiting time as a function of arrival patterns, service time distributions, number and types of servers, and various queue disciplines are well known. In this note, we address the problem of managing queues by managing perceptions of waiting. Basic operations-management principles can easily address issues of fairness: form one line instead of many; apply first-come, first-served principles (unless an "express lane" can be formed in a way that everyone finds fair); do not allow line jumping. Innovative approaches to queue management, though, can alleviate or reverse the boredom and manage expectations, making the process less painful for customers and front-line employees through three mechanisms: (1) eliminating or reducing the wait, (2) managing expectations, and (3) enhancing the experience. We discuss numerous examples of innovative queue management that fit into this framework.

Safe Boat Trip Private Limited (Safe Boat Trip) of Kerala, India, is planning to launch a hydrofoil ferry service connecting the Port of Kochi, India, with two other ports in the state of Kerala by August 2016, to benefit from the tourism potential of the season in Kerala. The managing director has asked the principal superintendent of Safe Boat Trip to prepare a project plan for the boats to be commissioned into service, following approval from the Indian Register of Shipping (IRS). The principal superintendent must also carry out a break-even analysis of the project investment. With these challenges before him, the superintendent must set out to devise a solid plan of action before the company's next meeting.

Safe Boat Trip Private Limited (Safe Boat Trip) of Kerala, India, is planning to launch a hydrofoil ferry service connecting the Port of Kochi, India, with two other ports in the state of Kerala by August 2016, to benefit from the tourism potential of the season in Kerala. The managing director has asked the principal superintendent of Safe Boat Trip to prepare a project plan for the boats to be commissioned into service, following approval from the Indian Register of Shipping (IRS). The principal superintendent must also carry out a break-even analysis of the project investment. With these challenges before him, the superintendent must set out to devise a solid plan of action before the company’s next meeting.

This case depicts an actual, real sequence of events in L'Oreal's Active Cosmetics Supply Chain. The case provides an illustration of the challenges facing large, multi-national organizations in aligning their supply chain planning along several dimensions. The span of the planning is from customers in several markets to the centralized production at the single source factory. The framework for laying out the facts of the case is the senior operations management request to conduct a supply chain planning audit on the Active Cosmetics planning process. The audit request was a direct response to complaints regarding customer service levels by general management. The case begins by setting the narrative that sets the audit in motion. Key actors across the supply chain speak their voices through testimony to the auditor, who serves as protagonist in the story of the case. This vehicle permits the case to express different points of view with objectivity, allowing the reader to consider the validity of each actor's behaviour using that actor's perspective. The case ends with a challenge to the reader to finish what the narrator has started. Having seen the case through his eyes, the reader must now experience the rest of the story as the narrator experienced, and prepare their own analysis and presentation for senior management.

In May 2016, Michael Rechtin, an expert in international data center law, advised global financial services firm Great Lakes Banking Group (GLBG) on its plans to upgrade its data centers. The bank's data processing and storage systems were in need of an update, and since GLBG last made heavy IT investments in the late 1990s, the technology had changed considerably. GLBG sought Rechtin's advice on whether or not it should build a new data center, pursue a wholesale colocation solution, rent space from a retail colocation provider, or store more data in the cloud.

The use of additive manufacturing technologies in different industries has increased substantially during the past years. Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line that enabled mass production of identical products in the 20th century. Currently, additive manufacturing enables and facilitates production of moderate to mass quantities of products that can be customized individually. Additive manufacturing technologies are opening new opportunities in terms of production paradigm and manufacturing possibilities. Manufacturing lead times will be reduced substantially, new designs will have shorter time to market, and customer demand will be met more quickly. This article identifies additive manufacturing implementation challenges, highlights its evolving technologies and trends and their impact on the world of tomorrow, discusses its advantages over traditional manufacturing, explores its impact on the supply chain, and investigates its transformative potential and impact on various industry segments.