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This case study deals specifically with the issue of manufacturing strategy, and business strategy.

The case can be used in a number of course contexts, including undergraduate and MBA programs. The focus is on both business strategy and manufacturing strategy issues. The case can be assigned as an opening vignette, during the initial phases of business strategy, since the case situations and concepts are both simple and clear. It can also be assigned for an in-depth treatment of manufacturing strategy.

The case focuses on Capital Mills Limited (CML), a flour milling company, and concentrates on whether the company should refurbish its two 40-year old flour mills at a cost of US$6 million or if the company should invest US$15 million in the construction and installation of a new, fully-automated “Lights out” flour mill. This decision is viewed as a “make or break” decision for CML, since for the first time in the company's 40 year history will it face significant direct competition, in the form of the impending entry of a second flour milling company.

The case has four primary learning objectives, namely to: illustrate the linkages between business level strategy and the functional level, manufacturing strategy; discuss the role of a company's history and internal resource structure in the decision making process; explore how operational issues influence capital expenditure decisions; and explore the perspective of managers in different functions in an organization that is facing a new competitive challenge.

Teaching notes are available – consult your librarian for access.

Pharmaceutical marketing, brand protection.

It could be used with the pharmaceutical marketing students and MBA students for analysing counterfeit medicines' menace in developing countries and positioning of a disruptive technology. The case could be used for marketing consultants, Brand managers and executive development programmes to explore issues such as protecting brands through technology, pharmaceutical packaging marketing, competitiveness of counterfeit drugs, global harmonisation.

Against the backdrop of rising menace of counterfeit drugs in developing countries, the case talks in particular about an innovative pharmaceutical packaging company. The company has developed a unique security technology called non-ClonableID™ which can enable products to be authenticated throughout the supply chain, thus protecting brands and preventing misuse. Despite a promising technology, it poses challenges regarding its adoption and commercial success.

Counterfeiting as an inevitable result of Globalization has become a global nuisance and has to be dealt at global level. Brand protection could be one of the lowest cost tools for pharmaceutical companies to restore public confidence in their products and themselves. While all methods for anti-counterfeiting are known to have short lives the menace still must be dealt with. For this, companies need to deploy anti-counterfeiting strategies that set up various layers of security.

Teaching note.

This case describes the challenges faced by Amul in organising dairy farmers into a co-operative and creating continuous opportunities for value addition. Participants in the case discussion are required to review the developments in the organisation and recommend a strategy for the future.

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing, microeconomics and strategic management.

Target audience can be MBA students who are taking B2B marketing, microeconomics and strategic management courses.

On 1 January 2015, Hamza joined Hisham Packaging, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the CEO. Hisham Packaging specialises in production of corrugated boxes of various sizes, both in plain and printed forms. Most of Hamza’s experiences have been in the automobile industry, where his focus was on Lean operations rather than marketing. After joining Hisham Packaging, he learnt that in service industry like printing and packaging, the business focus is more customer-oriented than process-orientated. In the packaging industry, each customer’s requirement is unique and customised with variety and small volumes. What was shocking to him was that there is an informal cartel arrangement among major corrugated box suppliers in the country and without the consent of the cartel members, he cannot take any major decision like expanding the business or accepting or dropping a customer. Hamza discussed the scenario with his sales manager Ahmad to see what strategy to adopt for the growth of the company. He was trying to figure out what next? Like any other newly joined CEO, Hamza also had plans to increase the market share and make the operations Lean. He quickly found that it would be difficult for him to make any major impact on the existing business due to the constraints and he needed a different strategic move to grow the company.

The outcomes include understanding of market dynamics, cartelization of companies based on market structure and strategy building. Students learn that an organization’s performance is just not dependent on how the managers plan, organize and control but it also depends on the competitors and customer’s strategies. Students learn how to apply strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, Porter’s Five Forces analysis and PESTEL analysis in developing business strategy.

Teaching note is attached.

CSS 8: Marketing

Operations Management Quality Management.

The case can be used in a number of course contexts, including undergraduate and graduate courses in operations management and quality management.

Central Tobacco Plant (CTP) is a tobacco processing and packaging company, operating in the Central America and Caribbean region. This case focuses on a waste measurement exercise conducted in the cigarette production department of CTP, which was commissioned by George Edwards, the Secondary Manufacturing Department Manager. The reason for the exercise was the announcement that CTP could possibly face a plant audit, where a poor result could cause the shifting of manufacturing of some products, or, in the worst case scenario, all of it product lines, to one of the larger, and more efficient manufacturing plants in the Central America and Caribbean region. The waste measurement exercise is carried out as a three-week student–industry project by two students pursuing an MSc programme at the local university, who are mentored by both Edwards and by a university supervisor. At the end of the exercise, Edwards needs to consider the appropriateness of the current waste measurement system, the quantities of waste produced and opportunities to reduce waste.

The case has four primary learning objectives: to illustrate the role of performance measurement in process improvement, to explore the perspective of lean manufacturing in waste management, to apply basic quality tools in the analysis of a manufacturing process and to identify opportunities for process improvement.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 9: Operations and Logistics

The case focuses on the establishment and development of LYFEN, a Chinese leisure food brand. LYFEN created a business model of “small packaging + store.” Through accurate analysis of consumer habits, it quickly became one of the major brands in China's leisure food industry. In the process of entrepreneurship, it grasped the economic opportunity during SARS and quickly bought a large number of stores at low prices, laying the foundation for the rapid development of the follow-up. At the same time, its active practice of introducing information construction also further improved the business's competitiveness. Case B mainly focuses on the external and internal environment of LYFEN after 2015. According to estimates made in 2014, LYFEN's online sales were supposed to double, but LYFEN was gradually falling behind the competition.

Sustainable development; business, government, and society.

The case is designed to be taught to students at MBA and MA level.

In February 2009, Justin Smith, manager of the good business journey at Woolworths, a leading South African department store, was a worried man. Woolworths had launched its five-year sustainability strategy just under two years before. After undertaking an impact assessment, Smith was concerned that the original targets – which covered transformation, social development, the environment and climate change – had been set without a clear understanding of exactly what it would take to achieve them. Woolworths had recently identified ten key risk areas that impacted on the achievement of its original goals. If the sustainability goals were not reached, Woolworths could lose credibility among its shareholders, staff, and consumers. What did Woolworths need to do to ensure that it achieved its sustainability goals? And had the company been too ambitious in the targets it had set initially, he wondered?

To examine the differences, if any, between sustainable development in South Africa and other developing nations and sustainable development in developed nations; to impart an understanding of sustainability in its broadest sense; to investigate the challenges in implementing sustainability strategies in business; to look at ways of measuring the success of sustainability strategies; and to explore whether and how sustainability strategies should differ across industry sectors and across companies.

Teaching notes.

Market development.

This case is intended to be used in strategic management, operations management for both undergraduate and graduate courses. It can also be used for value innovation and market development.

This case focuses on market development by Patanjali, a fast-growing organization crossing US$1bn of sales in five years of time span and declaring a target of doubling this figure in the financial year 2016-2017 (to reach US$1,500m). The prime focus of Patanjali is the health food segment based on herbal and Ayurveda science through the use of organically grown agricultural produce by integrating the associated value chains while radically benefitting all the stakeholders in a two-way process as suppliers as well as buyers/consumers. The fundamental context of the case is associated with the value chain development in terms of value addition on the basis of the organizational and leadership values in all the elements of the value chain of Patanjali products starting from suppliers to customers. The case emphasizes the role of the Patanjali Food & Herbal park in the value chain. Patanjali Food & Herbal Park is constantly striving for nation building more than profit accumulation. They have created a sustainable business benefiting all the stakeholders. The backbone of the Patanjali Food & Herbal Park lies in robust backward linkage and forward linkage. The context of the case presents an account of how the values based integration of the value chain is a strategic advantage and safeguards an organization from business environment threats.

The context of the case presents an account of how values based integration of the value chain is a strategic advantage and safeguard an organization from business environment threats. The case has a deep-rooted theoretical association with models like Porter’s Five Forces model on the one hand and also exemplifies how an organization can use blue ocean strategy through value-based value innovation. The context of the Black Swan perspective also emerges in the narration.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy.

Upon completion of the case study, the students will be able to find the challenges and underlying structures that cause the problem; the students will be able to identify the dynamic variables and develop the interconnection and interlinkages among the time-delayed variables to build the story of the business case; the students could develop the block diagram and could build the system dynamics model using the simulation software STELLA, and if they do not have the simulation software, even then they could have a mental model to understand the problem well; the system dynamics students can design the policies to make the system better behaved and recommend solutions; and the students could make mind maps and develop the mental model and could recommend solutions and way forward to overcome the challenges and solve the issues.

Tradeasia is a small-scale manufacturing firm that had started its business activities near Sundar Industrial Estate, Raiwind, in September 2007. The company’s prime focus was to buy the potato starch from chips manufacturing companies and, then, extract the potato starch from the waste potato using its own machinery and sell it as a sizing agent to textile mills. Quality characteristics in terms of better millage and enhanced gullibility made it compatible with Rafhan corn-based starch. The major challenge linked to potato starch was its degree of wetness; the potato starch either extracted from rotten potato or procured from the potato chips manufacturing companies had a high degree of wetness and moisture content. Wet potato starch sometimes had more than 60% moisture content, which was really a challenge. Owing to the high degree of wetness, the wet starch was prone to fungus growth, and within hours, the fungus created toxins if it was not dried immediately, and then after 24 h, toxins acquired a black colour, and they became hardened like pebbles. The starch then was unusable even for sizing purposes for textile products. Reduction in the degree of wetness was really a big challenge and demanded prompt action and high productivity of the operational staff to make that product dry for sale purposes. This was the biggest challenge that ended up in huge inventories of wet starch. Capacity constraints and operational inefficiency killed the company’s productivity and affected the company’s profit.

This case study is written and developed for MBA and MS-level supply chain students of the system dynamics course or those studying management of supply chain complexities. This case study discusses the operational challenges while running the business; huge inventories, capacity constraints and inefficiency in production operations were the challenges associated with almost all manufacturing industries. This case study discussed not only why such challenges are appearing in the business but also the solution that resided in the wisdom shared by the employees in the board meeting. An integrated system dynamics model could be used to design the policies to overcome such challenges. Even the block diagram of the model and causal loop diagram could help to conceptualize the problem and explore the way forward.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 7: Management science.

The case describes the performance evaluation system that has been put in place by Ravi Kumar, the MD to ensure that Oystar Hassia is able to design, deliver, service, sell its packaging machines seamlessly in all parts of the world. The performance evaluation system is periodic, regular, able to take track the progress of the people within the system. The benefits accrued from performance evaluation system are also detailed in this case.