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The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board, Canada's largest pension fund with over $40 billion in assets, had just listened to a presentation addressing a method for identifying and controlling the pension fund's exposure to market risks known as Value At Risk. The Board needed to understand what Value At Risk represented, what assumptions went into the risk management systems and how it might impact on policy decisions. This case introduces students to the risk management of investment portfolios, highlighting benefits and limitations.

The Executive Director of a non-profit organization must deal with the fact that over the past few years, the organization has experienced a decline in volunteers, men who offer consistent adult male companionship to boys from father absent homes. They must tackle the challenges of:<ul><li>Recruiting and retaining volunteers in the cash-strapped 1990's.</li><li>Motivating people within the organization without the usual motivational tools (raises and threats of dismissal).</li><li>Practicing persuasive leadership techniques where they must constantly communicate, reiterate and reflect the shared values of the agency's volunteers.</li></ul>

Two business partners of Hempline Inc. are trying to re-establish hemp as a feasible agricultural product in Canada. Their first request from a wood processing mill in Oregon, USA, has left them with a number of decisions to be made. Among the decisions, they must determine the number of labour hours, the number of machines to rent and the amount of land to rent for this specific order. Alternatives to renting machinery include purchasing new and used equipment. As well, they wanted to calculate the cost per ton of this experimental crop to meet effectively with the Oregon firm.

On Wednesday, February 2, 1994, Ted Rogers, president and CEO of Rogers Communications (RCI), announced that a strategic merger was being sought with Maclean Hunter Limited (MHL). Over the course of the last several weeks, a private company controlled by Mr. Rogers had purchased a block of stock representing approximately 8 percent of the shares held by the public. The focus of the case is to formulate a presentation to RCI's board of directors, which discusses the price, strategy and terms of a planned offer to acquire all remaining MHL shares.

The focus of the case is on deal-making in the context of a structured note. The challenge for the student is the placement of US$125 million of Special Purpose Trust (SPT) paper. The financing was to fund SPT's forward purchase of a portion of the future oil production. The structure of the note has to be modified in order to place the paper in a short period of time.

The owners of Xantrex Technology Inc. are negotiating an injection of equity capital of $3 million. Students are asked to design a deal which is acceptable to both the venture capitalists and the owners. They must also design an appropriate shareholders' agreement. This case should be used in conjunction with Xantrex Technology Inc., case 9A96B051.

The case traces the story of Canadian Airlines from its early days of profitable regional operations, growth through acquisitions to the status of a national and international carrier, and ultimately to the crisis of the early and mid 90s. Fundamental questions of strategy need to be resolved. How is revenue generated? What are the sources of cost? How do airlines make profits? In pursuing these questions, students need to sort out the realities of the airline industry and the specific opportunities and challenges facing Canadian.

An entrepreneur's application for a loan to open a small restaurant is rejected. As a consequence, the restaurant's cash position is a concern. The case requires the student to calculate three cash budgets based on expected, optimistic and pessimistic sales projections.

Two partners who own a popular restaurant franchise must decide whether to open an outdoor patio. They must identify differential costs, categorize them as recurring flows (variable or fixed) or one-time flows (investments), perform sensitivity analysis, and calculate the projected return on investment to support their decision.

The chief financial officer of Sunshine Juice Company needs to finalize the company's marketing strategy for the upcoming year. Initial results for the launch of the company's product, a four-litre bag-in-a-box orange juice product, had been favourable. The case touches on all aspects of developing a marketing strategy, with emphasis on price setting and distribution.

This case documents the origins and development of a collaborative interorganizational system. This system is an experimental broadband network being used to trial both ATM technology and new applications such as the transmission, retrieval and archiving of medical images. Director of LARG*net confronts the difficulties of technological innovation and interorganizational management. It provides an illustration of the technical difficulties in integrating different systems, ensuring security, and the ramifications to an organization's own systems when connectivity with other organizations is attempted. It highlights the fact that IT infrastructure is more than just physical hardware. At the same time it raises the issues of handling accountability and responsibility across organizational boundaries.

The vice president, finance of a firm notes that although performance of the firm as measured by traditional accounting measures has steadily improved, share price has been decreasing. She attempts to employ the concept of economic value added to get to the bottom of the puzzle.

Mike Wilson and Jim Thompson of Northern Mining Inc., a Canadian-listed junior-mining company, deliberated carefully the prospect of acquiring the largest graphite deposit in Ontario, owned by Graphite Mining Corporation (GMC). GMC's U.S. parent company, the Jameson Corporation, had stopped mining operations in the previous year and then proceeded to sell its interest in GMC to Quebec-based graphite producer Graphcar Inc. Over the past five years, CDN$30 million had been spent in developing the mine and erecting a mill, and now Graphcar Inc. was prepared to sell the mill for CDN$1.5 million. (A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is available for use with this case, product 7A96B014.)

The deregulation of the natural gas industry permitted the creation of new companies, gas marketers or gas banks, such as CoWest. Still in its first year of operations, CoWest had the opportunity to bid on a fixed-price long-term contract to supply gas to a cogeneration plant. The focus of the case is to investigate the possibilities of putting a deal together using financial derivatives.

The assistant treasurer of Videotron Ltee (Videotron) pondered over the Citibank proposals that lay on his desk. Videotron was about to launch a US$150 million, 10-year high yield issue in almost a week's time. Since Videotron's business was transacted almost exclusively in Canadian dollars, it would be exposed to foreign exchange risk on the US-dollar denominated interest and principal debt payments. In light of the recent and dramatic depreciation of the Canadian dollar against the U.S. dollar, the treasurer wondered if he should hedge this exposure. The Citibank Canada exposure management team had proposed hedging techniques using either forwards or cross-currency swaps. (A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is available for use with this case, product 7A96B021.)

This case demonstrates how forming strategic partnerships with suppliers and clients can lead to win-win-win situations in the supply chain. It can be used to discuss the importance of information sharing and the use of information technology to drive the direction of the individual relationships. It also shows how cultivating partnerships can result in a competitive advantage in a highly competitive service industry. Techniques for developing and maintaining such a relationship are also brought out in the case, and it provides an opportunity to focus on the key concepts of supply chain management as they apply to service industries.

This is a condensed version of case 9A95E003. Western Mining Corporation is one of Australia's largest mining companies. This case tells the story of a large information system project from its inception through its development and to the eve of its rollout into the implementation phases. The Operations Management Project was commissioned to produce the Operations Management System (OMS), a new information system designed to provide operational personnel with better and more timely information to help them in their daily tasks. The project experienced significant delays and problems, from project management difficulties, to systems development methodology shortcomings, to steering committee dealings. Two additional cases on the Operations Management Project are also available: Western Mining Corporation (B), case 9A95E005, and Western Mining Corporation (C), case 9A95E006. The three cases together provide a rich and comprehensive description of the various challenges experienced by information systems personnel and operational personnel alike in the course of developing and implementing new information systems. Both the original case and the (B) case can stand on their own. The (C) case is best used in conjunction with the (B) case.

LBT Acquisition Corp. (LBTAC) made a Cdn$24 per share hostile takeover bid for John Labatt Limited (Labatt). LBTAC was a subsidiary of Onex Corporation (Onex), a Toronto-based conglomerate which secured financial assistance from Quilmes Industrial S.A., a Luxembourg-based holding company. Prior to the Onex bid, Labatt had been negotiating a merger with Interbrew S.A./N.V., Belgium's largest brewer. People close to the negotiations indicated they had heard rumors that the Dutch Brewer, Heineken N.V., and others were prepared to make bids. The case is from the perspective of Wood Gundy, the financial advisor to Labatt. The challenge for the student is to structure a deal in order to maximize shareholder value.

The operations manager of the Westover Inn has an opportunity to obtain an equity position in the Inn and is trying to decide whether it makes sense for him to take advantage of it. The case examines a purchase decision from a broad range of perspectives - finance, accounting, model building, operations, marketing, strategy, human resources, communications, information technology - and particularly the interaction between the concerns of these functions. A related issue is to determine the value of the property. The focus of the case is the Inn's financial condition - its statements and projections - and various alternative approaches to evaluation. (A supplement to this case, Westover Inn (B), case 9A96M004, is available.)

The environmental coordinator at the Chatham Assembly Plant of Navistar International Corporation, must develop a total waste management program which addresses both corporate waste reduction objectives and regulatory requirements. At the time of the case, a plant-wide waste audit had just been completed by an outside contractor in response to the introduction of provincial legislation, referred to as 3R Regulations. The environmental coordinator must assess the competitive implications of different alternatives, design the program, decide which materials will be recycled, identify who will be involved in implementation, and take into account the reaction of different stakeholder groups. (A sequel to this case titled Navistar: Environmental Management (B), case 9A96D002, is available.)