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In April 2023, Maxwell Cutler, director of marketing and sweet potato sales at Race-West Company (Race-West), faced a daunting challenge of high demand for produce in the week leading up to Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. With a responsibility to ship 35–40 truckloads per day, Cutler was under pressure to ensure timely deliveries to satisfy and retain customers. Despite his best efforts and collaboration with his cousin Rachel Pisarz, who managed onion sales, multiple incidents disrupted the transportation process. Cutler received phone calls and emails reporting missing drivers, misloaded shipments, late deliveries, truck breakdowns, and extreme weather conditions. These disruptions resulted in significant financial losses for Race-West as well the loss of some customers. Determined to resolve the situation, he wondered what steps he could take to address these challenges and implement measures to avoid encountering similar issues in the future.

<p align="justify">At the end of December 2022, the chief executive officer of Logic Fruit Technologies (LFT), a product engineering research and development company, was trying to decide which of three partnerships to pursue to double the company’s profit margin percentage by 2025. LFT was headquartered in Gurgaon, India, and provided end-to-end solutions in electronic design outsourcing. LFT’s board of directors wanted to make a decision at its meeting on January 30, 2023.

The case study examines the journey toward value-based healthcare at Karolinska University Hospital. The hospital's ambitious shift to a patient-centered care delivery model, accompanied by the construction of a new facility, encountered challenges such as high costs, staff dissatisfaction, and growing waiting lists. The departure of CEO Melvin Samsom in 2018 left the new director Bjorn Zoega with a budget deficit, discontented staff, and an outdated IT system. By 2023, however, Zoega had achieved a remarkable turnaround. Ranked among the top 6 international hospitals, the institution boasted a positive budget and had exceeded production assignments for three consecutive years. In 2023, Zoega pondered if his changes were long-lasting and how the Hospital should face new challenges such as an aging population and a shortage of qualified nurses.

Considers McDonald's efforts to build resilience into its global supply chain so that the company and its suppliers can better navigate the increasing pressures and pace of climate change and regulatory change, including a focus on supplying sustainable beef, while the company seeks to continue is current pace of growth and deliver on multiple public commitments.

On Thursday, July 13, 2017, the project manager and the chief executive officer for A-Media Limited were making a significant decision about their company. They could quickly increase their billboard hoardings by 20 per cent by pre-emptively erecting giant mega boards in five locations of interest to a major client. This was a significant opportunity, but it presented several significant risks. One major risk was the client’s need to have the mega boards ready before the Christmas season. The client would not commit to renting the space until the boards were at least 90 per cent completed. Was this time frame too short to confirm the prime locations, secure all government permits, hire suppliers and subcontractors, and erect the five structures? How could A-Media Limited manage five geographically dispersed projects simultaneously when the scheduling, supervising, suppliers, city permits, and city inspectors would be different in each location? The project manager had to quickly determine the feasibility of the project, which involved building a detailed schedule and budget.

This MPP file is one of two MS Project files that accompany W33313.

This MPP file is the second of two MS Project files that accompany W33313.

On Thursday, July 13, 2017, the project manager and the chief executive officer for A-Media Limited were making a significant decision about their company. They could quickly increase their billboard hoardings by 20 per cent by pre-emptively erecting giant mega boards in five locations of interest to a major client. This was a significant opportunity, but it presented several significant risks. One major risk was the client's need to have the mega boards ready before the Christmas season. The client would not commit to renting the space until the boards were at least 90 per cent completed. Was this time frame too short to confirm the prime locations, secure all government permits, hire suppliers and subcontractors, and erect the five structures? How could A-Media Limited manage five geographically dispersed projects simultaneously when the scheduling, supervising, suppliers, city permits, and city inspectors would be different in each location? The project manager had to quickly determine the feasibility of the project, which involved building a detailed schedule and budget.

St. Gianna Healthcare (SGH) was a community health centre located in Kochi, in the southern state of Kerala, India, offering government-approved medical checkups and health certifications, specialist consulting services in obstetrics and gynecology, and dental care. SGH's medical administrator was concerned about service management issues at the clinic in recent months. While there had been a recent increase in patient numbers, she was concerned about customer experience. In particular, she was trying to assess whether patient waiting times and service turnaround were satisfactory, given the dependencies SGH had on capacity, scheduling, and overall service management at the clinic, and was considering her options for improvements.

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was a world-renowned giant panda research institution and tourism destination and had successfully attracted millions of tourists since its opening. The surge in tourists, however, had also increased pressure to provide a tourist-friendly experience, and long wait times generated more complaints than any other issue. Tourists experienced long queues at the ticket offices and at the entrances of the panda house and delivery room, which greatly impacted their experience. Moreover, long queues also created other issues, such as managing crowding and the negative impacts on the giant pandas’ emotional and psychological health as a result of the noise generated by tourists waiting in lines.

Pharmaceutical companies have historically relied on their ability to research, develop, manufacture, and sell drug products. Developing a successful drug is a complex and lengthy process, with no guarantee of success, and the total cost of approving a new drug is estimated at $2.5 billion, and rising. This technical note offers an overview of changes in the biotechnology industry related to drug development, focusing on M&A, the milestone model, and venture capital.

Set in early 2023, the case exposes students to the challenges of managing open source software at Google. The case focuses on the challenges for Alex Spinelli, Vice President of Product Management for Core Machine Learning. He must set priorities for Google's efforts in open source communities. An important priority is the TensorFlow framework. Released by Google in 2014, it supports many advances in modern artificial intelligence and continues supporting it. Spinelli must also manage open source activities in additional areas, such as the Android operating system for mobile handsets and cloud computing. The choices and strategies have consequences for Google's position as a technological leader among programmers who use and write code and for the safety and transparency of the code Google uses and supports. The case frames questions about what, if anything, Google should change with the explosion of interest in generative AI.

The case describes how the Greek oil-spill specialist Polygreen diversified into municipal waste management and turned the Aegean paradise of Tilos into the world's first zero-waste island. Focusing on the company's charismatic CEO, Athanasios Polychronopoulos, the case follows the implementation of a business model based on the principles of the circular economy. The project progresses from the selection of the location to negotiating a "free" contract with the municipality, to rebuilding a whole new team and raising awareness in a community where sorting and recycling are not the norm. A few months later, the operation has to scale up massively for the summer season to cope with thousands of tourists. The results of this apparently successful experiment enable Polygreen to bid for similar business in new municipalities and markets in the Middle East, where it can apply the learning from Tilos.

Pierre Honnorat, chief manager of the United Nations Response Depot (UNHRD), was faced with a daunting challenge. He and his team had to develop a strategy that would improve the efficacy and reduce the cost of offering logistics services. UNHRD's storage infrastructure enabled its partners to store relief supplies and equipment in strategic locations to ensure a rapid response during crises. In the humanitarian sector, this storage strategy - stockpiling in anticipation of sudden need - is known as pre-positioning. Since UNHRD offered some logistics services such as free storage, it relied on funding to cover some of its operational costs. But over the past decade, humanitarian needs had skyrocketed, while available resources had not. Honnorat and his team had decided to address this problem by analyzing two options for optimizing UNHRD's supply chain: 1) cut costs by changing the service offer while retaining the existing network, and 2) add a regional storage level to the existing network in Kampala to serve East Africa.

This two-part case examines the major challenges faced by Simplyk, a start-up with a social mission related to volunteering and the non-profit ecosystem. Part A provides an overview of the context in which this social innovation was created, describing the business model and methodology developed by the organization to facilitate volunteering. Part B describes the transformation of Simplyk's business model into an innovative fundraising platform and some of the difficulties encountered.

This two-part case examines the major challenges faced by Simplyk, a start-up with a social mission related to volunteering and the non-profit ecosystem. Part A provides an overview of the context in which this social innovation was created, describing the business model and methodology developed by the organization to facilitate volunteering. Part B describes the transformation of Simplyk's business model into an innovative fundraising platform and some of the difficulties encountered.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a holistic approach to quantifying the environmental impacts-including resources consumed and wastes produced-associated with the entire life cycle of a product, from the production or extraction of the raw materials used in its creation, to its end-of-use disposition. LCAs are often used to better understand how choices made in a product's design (e.g., materials, assembly, energy sources, energy efficiency) would affect its overall environmental impact. This note provides an overview of the different types of LCAs, LCA methodology, and LCA tools and databases.

This case tells the story of Microsoft's 2018 acquisition of GitHub and the subsequent launch of GitHub Copilot, a tool that uses generative artificial intelligence to suggest snippets of code to software developers in real time. Set in late 2021, when Copilot was still in beta, the case asks how Microsoft and GitHub should roll out Copilot to the public.

The case describes how AntChain's parent, Ant Group, started to invest in blockchain in 2015 as it believed the technology would build trust between different actors in a system. The earliest use case was a cross-border remittance service. The team continued to build and develop its blockchain technology, launching a new generation of blockchain-enabled high-speed communication networks and reducing bandwidth costs by 80%. The team went on to win many Chinese and international awards and partnered with training centres and universities to develop the technology. The team was able to monetise its blockchain through BaaS with different strategies, such as service fees and subscription models, depending on what the client needed.

Continuous improvement is about shifting the focus from capital equipment to operational culture. After World War II, manufacturing responded to the need to ramp up production by buying equipment as quickly and with as much capacity as possible. Given that manufacturing is a system, mass ad hoc capital purchases created inefficiencies. Toyota was the first company to push back on the capital equipment approach and showed through lean manufacturing that there are better approaches to scaling than just buying capital equipment. This was the first appearance of continuous improvement, but similar non-capital approaches such as Six Sigma found ways to improve productivity, flexibility, and quality through focusing on coordination rather than equipment. Lean management has been credited with taking Toyota from obscurity to the top of the automotive industry in the last half of the 20th century. Competitors such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler were happy to copy specific tools in assuming they could replicate the Toyota success, but they were disappointed with their results. It is imperative for companies to understand their operations before beginning any good continuous improvement regime. There are two modes of failure for continuous improvement initiatives and the first is the mode where operations management staff’s knowledge is weak. The second failure mode in implementing continuous improvement is using the wrong metric in project selection.