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The importance of story‐telling in organizational life has often been overlooked in contemporary organizational and leadership literature. Throughout history, leaders ‐ political and religious ‐ have used story‐telling as a powerful motivational tool, particularly during times of uncertainty, change and upheaval or in response to crises. This article looks at the role of story‐telling as an integral part of the human experience and at its applications in modern organizational life. The article concludes by suggesting that the art of story‐telling is still, despite recent advances in communication technologies, an essential managerial skill ‐ particularly for leaders of organizations.

The subject area is operations management.

The case is to be used at master’s level, for example, MBA courses on operations management, operations research, logistics management and supply chain management.

It was the morning of 20 September 2012 and the three directors of Distromed Bioclean Pvt. Ltd. were in the office discussing the developments from past night’s meeting with the Rajkot Chapter of the Indian Medical Association. They are a bio-medical waste treatment facility involved in collection, treatment and disposal services and charge yearly subscription fees. On 13 September 2012, fuel prices had gone up consecutively for the second year. Last year, the doctors resisted the fee hike and seemed reluctant this year again. In response, management of the company was looking for ways to minimize the total distance travelled by its fleet to reduce the operating cost.

The paper enables illustration of concepts of routing/scheduling and generation of optimal solutions in a realistic setting; and developing the understanding regarding the travelling salesman problem, Chinese postman problem and the entire family of vehicle routing problems and vehicle scheduling problems.

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CSS 9: Operations and Logistics.