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At this point, the Oracle acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005 seems like ancient history (at least in technology years). In fact, the PeopleSoft acquisition is not even Oracle's latest major acquisition (Siebel was acquired in September 2005). One of the primary reasons that Oracle acquired PeopleSoft was to gain access to the 10,000+ customer base of PeopleSoft (and JD Edwards), which provides more than $1 billion in annual revenue. This customer base is a gift that keeps on giving in the form of a lucrative maintenance stream. This case study discusses options that PeopleSoft customers and, by extension, other enterprise software owners pursue to minimize enterprise resource planning (ERP) ongoing costs of ownership. The case encourages students to evaluate several criteria that can be used to lower ERP costs. There are no material requirements to run the case (other than Internet access).

The production manager at Lake Erie Paper (LEP) was considering installing a moisture meter to test the water content of the wood chips used to make corrugated paper. Use of a moisture meter would speed up the testing process and could reduce costs and/or improve paper quality, but the manager wanted to be sure that the meter provided a consistent and reliable measure of the water content of the arriving woodchips.

The City of London was expropriating a portion of Springbank Drive as part of a project to widen the road between Wharncliffe Road and Wonderland Road. The owner of Canning Consultants Inc. was retained by the city to assess the resultant property value loss for the affected residents. The consultant had assembled a database of residential sales along with various property attributes, and had to determine how to proceed in calculating appropriate compensation for the taking. This case is appropriate in a module on multiple linear regression models.

A research institute has a concern with the reliability requirements of a military vehicle. Reliability is the probability that a system will accomplish its designated mission in a satisfactory manner or in more specific terms, the probability that it will perform in a satisfactory manner for a given period when used under specified operating conditions. Reliability of a weapon system is often expressed in terms of mean time between failure (MTBF). Two military vehicles were tested to obtain reliability life data for reliability evaluation. The objective of this case is to introduce reliability concept, MTBF, life data analysis and objective procedure for a decision making.

The owners of a retail jewellry store must decide whether to continue to offer a snowfall promotion that gave customers a 100 per cent cash refund for all November and December purchases if there was more than 15 centimetres of snow on the following January 7.

The senior staff accountant was conducting an audit for a bank client. As part of the audit, the senior staff accountant needed to verify the total interest expenses and revenues reported by the bank during the 2004 fiscal year. He had gathered data on total interest revenues and expenses as reported by the bank, as well as, the prime rate as reported by the Bank of Canada. The staff accountant intends to use linear regression to examine the relationships between revenue and interest rates and between expenses and interest rates as a way of identifying outliers that may require more detailed attention as part of the audit.

A real estate appraiser has been hired to provide an alternate assessment on a set of office buildings in London, Ontario. Real estate assessments are often based on comparisons versus similar properties. However, because the set of comparison properties is small he cannot rely on standard quantitative techniques like linear regression. Instead he uses a technique called quality point in which the property valuation problem can be formulated as a quadratic program.

The head of clinical trials at Solnyx Pharmaceuticals had just been handed the results of a phase II trial of Atoxeril, a hypertension drug. Her task was to interpret these data in preparation for a meeting with her institutional review board and representatives of the Food and Drug Administration. This case introduces a number of concepts related to the analysis of clinical trials including dealing with missing data, ANOVA, regression and sample size calculations. Students will evaluate the design of the phase II clinical trial and interpret the trial results; they will also evaluate the implications of the angioedema incidence and how it might affect the design of a phase III trial.

A doctor is preparing for an upcoming meeting of the Ontario Drug Quality and Therapeutics committee. At this meeting the committee would need to make a decision about adding six new drugs to the Ontario formulary. The doctor needed to review the clinical and economic evidence on each drug in order to take a position on each at the meeting. The case introduces students to the concept of formularies and presents six representative cases for class discussion.

The chairman of Tallink - a ferry and cargo service running between Estonia, Finland and Sweden - is considering purchasing a new ferry and redeploying older ferries among different routes. One of the proposed new routes is from Tallinn, Estonia through Helsinki, Finland to St. Petersburg in Russia. The chairman needs to decide whether or not he should buy the new ferry and the optimal use of his fleet.

Acushnet Canada Inc. is considering using Canada Customs Bonded Warehouses to store golf shoes, gloves, outerwear and club heads inventory purchased from overseas suppliers. ACI often has to procure inventory four to six months before they needs it in order to ensure they will be able to meet customer requirements during the busy season. The critical managerial issue is considering the tradeoff between the cash flow savings (through duty postponement) and the need to meet the demand schedule, while taking into account storage limitations imposed by the private facility and their storage costs. This case can be used as an introduction to linear programming as well as an introduction to the concept of bonded warehouses.

Schering Plough is a large pharmaceutical company with over 22,000 employees worldwide, and over $6.8 billion in sales worldwide. The company is considering two options to replace its flagship drug, Claritin (an antihistamine), as Claritin's patent is soon to expire. One drug is targeted toward nasal congestion, the other towards asthma; however, each drug is at a different stage in the development process, one has greater market potential but was still in its early development stage, the other drug could be launched within the year but would appeal to a much smaller market. The company must decide which drug to pursue or whether to focus on both drugs or neither. The case allows students to do a traditional NPV analysis and decision analysis and the use of simulation.

A business consultant at a large bank must determine if a report indicating that more than half the bank's credit card holders are unprofitable is true. This case contains a dataset that enables students to utilize some of the built in data functions in Excel and provides a basis for discussion of data-mining tools, products 7B04E017A and 7B04E017B.

This case presents some information on the NCAA college basketball tournament and suggests a method for estimating the outcomes of games. The probability of winning is modeled as a normal distribution where the mean is based on a team's ratings. Students will be introduced to the normal distribution, sums of normal random variables and event simulations.

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group (DTAG) is considering offering a price guarantee to entice consumers to use their web site. Students will be introduced to break-even analysis and general spreadsheet modeling. This is an abridged version of Online Low Price Guarantees - Dollar.com, product # 9B04E016.

Mars Inc., one of the world's largest privately owned businesses, purchased over $4 billion of materials annually, and was aware that many major firms were achieving savings of around five per cent through the use of online procurement auctions. The vice-president for Business Solutions at Mars wondered whether an online auction could be designed that would meet the special needs of the Mars company while enabling Mars to achieve the savings necessary to allow the company to prosper and grow in its highly competitive markets.

Domglas Inc. must estimate the potential demand for ready-to-eat soup packaged in glass jars for the convenience of microwave-oven owners. (A Microsoft Excel data file is available for use with this case, product 7A80E002.)

The chief executive officer of Brent-Harbridge Developments had just received confirmation of several upcoming property auctions. Brent-Harbridge Developments was currently asset short after some successful recent disposals, which made the CEO keenly interested in three of the properties being auctioned. She needed to prepare a bidding strategy in order to try to acquire at least one or perhaps more of the development properties being auctioned. (A Microsoft Excel data file is available for use with this case, product 7A98E042.)

Management at PCB Manufacturing, Inc. was concerned that a significant number of faulty printed circuit boards were reaching their customers. Should the testing system be changed so that the number of bad boards being shipped decreases? (A Microsoft Excel model is available for use with this case, product 7A98E043.)

The CEO of Northern Napa Valley Winery must forecast aggregate sales of red table wine for the product year, as well as month-by-month sales for the same period. This case provides the student with the opportunity to try to forecast a time series characterized by distinct trend and seasonality with almost nine years of monthly data available. (A Microsoft Excel data file is available for use with this case, product 7A98E046.)