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Brodie Arens is an MBA student and summer intern at Three Jays Corporation, a jam and jelly manufacturer in Michigan. Brodie's first assignment as an intern is to update the inventory and production planning system. Initially, he begins by updating the Economic Order Quantities (EOQ) and Reorder Points (ROP) for each product. However, he soon learns that the formal production planning system was being ignored by the workers on the factory floor. Consequently, Brodie has to decide what should be done with the system and how to implement his recommendations. This case illustrates the 2 major types of errors that can occur when using Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) as a tool in production scheduling. It can be used in an inventory control or tradeoff analysis section in a production and operations management course or in a supply chain management course.

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This two-part case revolves around a mandate given by Ganesh Purandare, head of the financial services business unit at SDL, a growing software development company, to Mohua Sen, head of recruitment for the division, whereby he asks her to reduce recruitment times. For SDL, each lateral hire is done against a billable opportunity. Hence, timely or early fulfilment is critical not only to ensuring project deliverables but also for addressing the immediate billability question. Part A: Mohua Sen examines the entire process timelines and considers the feasibility of reducing recruitment times. The principles of business process re-engineering are used to study the problem of process cycle time reduction. Students are asked to provide possible solutions.

This two-part case revolves around a mandate given by Ganesh Purandare, head of the financial services business unit at SDL, a growing software development company, to Mohua Sen, head of recruitment for the division, whereby he asks her to reduce recruitment times. For SDL, each lateral hire is done against a billable opportunity. Hence, timely or early fulfilment is critical not only to ensuring project deliverables but also for addressing the immediate billability question. Part B: The case describes the implementation of the solution as applied by Mohua Sen in a pilot project in her division. Challenges emerge regarding acceptance of this process and the effective implementation across the organization. This aspect builds on the gaps which exist between knowing and doing, how to understand and address key stakeholder concerns and how to bring about change in organizations.

The CEO of University Hospital expressed concern about the financial viability of the hospital's trauma care operations. On the one hand, trauma care was an important part of the hospital's community service mission and, as a teaching hospital, also part of its educational mission. On the other hand, trauma care had been a money-losing proposition for many years, and also had caused disruptions to the hospital's other care-delivery services. The CEO and the chief trauma surgeon (who served as the hospital's director of trauma services) collaborated to rethink physical arrangements and processes to make trauma care more effective at a lower cost. A natural solution, growing out of concepts from organization design and process architecture, would be to reorganize resources and create an area dedicated to trauma care. For those familiar with operations management terminology, potential solutions can be drawn from cellular manufacturing concepts that have been effectively moved into the service sector. The case discussion helps to illustrate that changes in physical configuration cannot, by themselves, ensure success. Students are challenged to consider complementary factors that will support the configuration change, as well as the challenges the hospital might face in implementing and sustaining the reconfigured work unit.

Modeled loosely after the American restaurant chain Chipotle, Picante Mexican Grill seeks to offer fresh and healthy vegetarian fast-food options. The owners of this start-up chain in Gurgaon, India, struggle to manage their quickly growing operation. As they consider expanding into new locations, diverse issues-including determining store hours, location, managing centralized production, and meeting staffing needs-challenge the entrepreneurial trio.

In 2006, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, was looking for a way to solve Netflix's customer churn problem. Netflix used Cinematch, its proprietary movie recommendation software, to promote individually determined best-fit movies to customers. Hastings determined that a 10% improvement to the Cinematch algorithm would decrease customer churn and increase annual revenue by up to $89 million. However, traditional options for improving the algorithm, such as hiring and training new employees, were time intensive and costly. Hastings decided to improve Netflix's software by crowdsourcing, and began planning the Netflix Prize, an open contest searching for a 10% improvement on Cinematch. The case examines the dilemmas Hastings faced as he planned the contest, such as whether to use an existing crowdsourcing platform or create his own, what company information to expose, how to protect customer privacy while making internal datasets public, how to allocate IP, and how to manage the crowd.

Kundanmal Mukanmal Trans Logistics Pvt. Ltd. (KM) is a well-known road transportation company in Western India, operating out of its headquarters as a family business in Jaipur. It functions as a logistics provider for flatbed steel and finished automobiles (primarily four-wheeler passenger cars and light to medium cargo vehicles). The co-executive directors are grappling with large delays with the workshop repairs that are hurting the timely truck availability and causing immense customer dissatisfaction (with about 14 per cent of the trucks taking more than one day to complete their repair). The co-executive directors believe that staffing the workshop with the right number of labourers may address the issue of long repair delays — but is the issue just with the labour availability? Is the number of bays available for repair sufficient for the volume of truck repairs? What is causing the trucks to pile up at the workshop?

Kundanmal Mukanmal Trans Logistics Pvt. Ltd. (KM) is a well-known road transportation company in Western India, operating out of its headquarters as a family business in Jaipur. It functions as a logistics provider for flatbed steel and finished automobiles (primarily four-wheeler passenger cars and light to medium cargo vehicles). The co-executive directors are grappling with large delays with the workshop repairs that are hurting the timely truck availability and causing immense customer dissatisfaction (with about 14 per cent of the trucks taking more than one day to complete their repair). The co-executive directors believe that staffing the workshop with the right number of labourers may address the issue of long repair delays - but is the issue just with the labour availability? Is the number of bays available for repair sufficient for the volume of truck repairs? What is causing the trucks to pile up at the workshop?

After a highly successful third round of funding in 2012, Gaurav Jain, founder of quick service restaurant chain Mast Kalandar, was looking to expand. In addition to opening new stores in other cities, Jain was also hoping to increase the profitability of his existing stores in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune. He needed to fully understand the financials of his current operations and identify the key drivers of success at the stores, at both the city and corporate levels. With this understanding, he would be able to evaluate how best to improve the performance of existing outlets and to choose an entry strategy for new cities. Students are asked to develop a financial model for outlets and use it to compare different growth strategies.

Spreadsheet supplement for product KEL809.

How does one learn to become an effective advocate on public health issues? "To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate: The Story of Hamilton, Columbia" introduces the reader to the fictional US state of Columbia and its legislature's dilemma over whether to mandate the HPV vaccine for the state's young people or simply to educate them and their parents on the importance and availability of the vaccine. On the surface this appears to be a straightforward public health question: Will a vaccine mandate or a voluntary educational effort be more effective in preventing HPV infection and ultimately HPV-related cancers? But as the narrative unfolds, we come to understand that the legislative context is much more complicated and the tensions myriad, complete with financial and political deal making, power contests in anticipation of an upcoming election, and much more. Furthermore, given that the scientific evidence is still incomplete in some aspects and does not necessarily point to a single best option for the state, the ethical concerns at stake become all the more important. What should Columbia do? As the story draws to a close, the state legislature's Health, Education, and Labor Committee is about to open a public hearing on the dilemma, inviting an array of experts, community leaders, pharmaceutical reps, and government staffers and elected officials to speak on two bills under consideration: one for a mandate and the other for education only. This is where the students will step in to bring the hearing to life, arguing for the course of action they think is most prudent and learning techniques in effective legislative advocacy on important public health issues in the process.

What should a supply chain do well? After an introduction to key terms and concepts, the core reading moves on to the strategic and operational decisions behind a supply chain that matches the need for responsiveness and efficiency. Within this framwork, it presents the strategic and operational decisions behind improving efficiency, and introduces concepts such as sales and operations planning, the bullwhip effect (and steps for avoiding this phenomenon), and updating demand forecasts. Practical strategies for improving responsiveness focus on delayed differentiation and in-depth discussion of read-react capability. The reading concludes by shifting to the design stage of a supply chain, . A supplemental reading also explores sources of supply chain risk, building resilience, and future requirements for compliance, transparency, and traceability.

Spreadsheet supplement for product KEL809.

Qihoo, one of the largest Internet companies in China today, was founded in 2005. The company started its business by offering a security software product, and quickly dominated the market in China after its unusual move of giving its product away for free in 2009. Later, it expanded its offering to cover a broad spectrum of Internet and mobile security products. In 2012 the company launched its own Internet search engine called So.com. By August 2013, So.com captured 18% PC market share, and had posed a threat to Baidu, China's largest and most established search engine provider. Yet to compete against Baidu and other Chinese Internet giants in the long run, Qihoo needed to find a way to replicate its PC market success in the mobile market. How could Qihoo continue to evolve its search engine business and what was the best mobile strategy to help the company grow?

Tata Cummins Limited (TCL), a leading manufacturer of diesel engines in India, faced a variety of challenges in meeting the October 2010 deadline for new automobile emissions standards. These standards are identified as Bharat Stage (BS) standards ranging from BS I to BS V. The subject of this case - the BS III standard - was introduced in 2005 for just 11 cities across India and then made mandatory for the entire country by October of 2010. At that time, the BS IV standard had already been implemented in a few large cities and it was this standard that was expected to exist nationwide by 2017. Reflecting on their successful experience with the transition to the 2010 automobile emissions standards, the vice-president of TCL hoped to make this next transition a smooth one by identifying the issues that the company would face in the near future.

What do you do when your rising professional career is cut short by an unexpected cancer diagnosis? Kathy Giusti shifted careers, built a new organization that transformed how cancer research is done, and now faces the challenge of sustaining the organization and its funding for its newest venture. Since she was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma (MM) in 1996, Giusti had led an effort to better understand and treat the disease. She had co-founded the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), helped form the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC), and brought together a diverse body of academics, researchers, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, physicians, and patients to combine their efforts around the disease. The MMRF had helped facilitate clinical trials for promising drugs, sponsored research, and raised a substantial amount of money for these purposes. In 2014, the MMRF was in the midst of its CoMMpass program; a multi-year effort to collect tissue samples from 1,000 patients at key junctures in their disease, sequence these samples to better understand the genetic underpinnings of MM and its many sub-types, and thus enable researchers to study a comprehensive sampling of patients. CoMMpass also had a patient-facing element which allowed the patient community to communicate with one another and with professional moderators. By mid-2014, some 550 patients were enrolled and 85 hospitals were participating. As a non-profit, the MMRF had historically relied on donations to fund its research operations. Giusti wanted to find a way to ensure a reliable revenue stream for the organization and give it greater financial stability. The MMRF had historically given away its resources and knowledge for free in order to speed research; Giusti worried if charging for some of its functions would be at odds with its mission and historical practices.

At 6:05 a.m., the head office at Golden Horseshoe Constructors (GHC) was understandably empty and very quiet. The vice-president (VP) of purchasing settled in at his desk to review the bids for an upcoming condominium project and to then decide which window and door installation firm he would recommend for that portion of the job. GHC's president was expecting the decision first thing that morning. Just a day earlier, the president had strongly suggested that the work be given to Monyash Doors and Windows, a firm that had not submitted the lowest bid. In practice, all else being equal, the firm with the lowest priced bid would win the contract, but the VP was unsure how to proceed with the president's request and which of the four bids he should recommend.

At 6:05 a.m., the head office at Golden Horseshoe Constructors (GHC) was understandably empty and very quiet. The vice-president (VP) of purchasing settled in at his desk to review the bids for an upcoming condominium project and to then decide which window and door installation firm he would recommend for that portion of the job. GHC's president was expecting the decision first thing that morning. Just a day earlier, the president had strongly suggested that the work be given to Monyash Doors and Windows, a firm that had not submitted the lowest bid. In practice, all else being equal, the firm with the lowest priced bid would win the contract, but the VP was unsure how to proceed with the president’s request and which of the four bids he should recommend.

Flipkart.com is one of India’s best known online retailers. Founded in 2007, with the ambitious dream of becoming India’s Amazon.com, Flipkart.com started out selling books and quickly expanded its product portfolio to include laptops, computer peripherals, consumer durables, consumer electronics, fashion accessories, media and games. Flipkart’s products were competitively priced, its customer service was exemplary and it offered innovative solutions to enhance the customer experience such as its cash on delivery service. These factors, coupled with a smart marketing mix and catchy advertisements that sensitized the Indian consumer to the online shopping experience, contributed to its rapid growth. While the customer viewed the company with rose-tinted glasses, all was not well within Flipkart. It was plagued by a multitude of issues, including a business model that swallowed cash faster than it was generated, increasing constraints on its operational and supply chain capabilities and deteriorating investor confidence. Indeed, Flipkart found itself in trouble in late 2012. With competitors hot on its heels and the imminent entry of Amazon.com into the Indian market, Flipkart had to evaluate its options carefully and make some smart moves if it was to survive and regain investor confidence.