Search results

This is the first implementation of Revenue Management System in a major international hotel chain in India. The case describes the history of development, corporate story of overdrive for profit, system integration issues. It describes two components of a revenue management system, forecasting and optimization. It also raises several questions that need to be addressed before implementing a RMS.

The case focuses on positioning a new brand, the Tata Nano. The car has been widely publicized as the world's cheapest car at Rs.1 lakh. Students must consider the gap between the ultimate target, the huge emerging middle class of Indian consumers, and the limited capacity and distribution available in choosing a target. They also must select between alternative competitive frames and the various points of difference they highlight. The case unfolds in two stages. The first decision point is in 2009, at the launch of the time of the product launch. The second decision point is 18 months later, after production capacity has increased and some product safety issues have arisen.

The primary goal of the case is to illustrate the choices made in developing a strong brand positioning and the interrelationship between these choices. Students select a target and an appropriate competitive frame of reference and point of difference for that target and summarize these elements in a positioning statement. The case also highlights importance of making promotion and distribution decisions that are consistent with the positioning.

This case was primarily researched using academic research papers, industry reports (Egg Industry Center and others), and finance databases including Standard and Poor’s Capital IQ. Regarding the cost and investment budgets, the case relies mainly on an experiment conducted by the Coalition for Sustainable Egg Supply, updated by the authors of this case.

Eggs produced by cage-free birds, while more expensive than conventionally produced eggs, are gaining in popularity among consumers who want only eggs that are produced more humanely. A number of major distributors, including Whole Foods, McDonalds and Starbucks have pledged to sell only cage-free produced eggs by 2025. Several states including California, Oregon and Michigan have passed laws limiting conventional egg production. The case provides costs and industry information and needed to project free cash flows and risk-adjusted opportunity cost of capital and perform break-even capital budgeting analysis of the two egg production alternatives.

This case is appropriate for graduate corporate finance courses. It is particularly appropriate for agribusiness finance courses. A preliminary exercise was used during the fall 2018 in a land grant university, just after the “Prevention of Cruelty to Farm Animals Act,” also known as Proposition 12, was passed in California in favor of cage-free egg production. The exercise was revised and used in the fall 2019 in the same class. This extended version of the case, was classroom tested in the fall 2020 in an agribusiness finance graduate class, with agricultural economics and business students enrolled.

The subject areas are Operations Management, Operations Research, Transportation and Logistics.

The following courses (MBA/Post Graduate level) can use the case as part of their teaching material: Applied Forecasting Techniques; Optimization Methods; Operations Research.

The case details a problem faced by the Gokuldhaam Society. The society was located a great distance from the city, as the majority of the residents who live in the society work in the nearby industrial area. To cater to the daily needs of residents, the society has shuttle buses plying to and from the city at different times during the day. However, due to operational inefficiencies, the administration faced excessive transportation costs. Looking for advice in this regard, the chairman of the society contacted the Head of Department at Operations Management, Indira Institute of Management, Indore hoping to find a way to reduce some of the operational costs.

The expected learning outcomes are as follows: to make the students apply two different stationary time series forecasting techniques to a real-life problem and data set; to make the students carefully choose a specific trend-based time series forecasting technique due to the inherent constraints in the availability of data set; and to make students appreciate the importance of application of linear programming in a time series problem.

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

This case was developed solely for the purpose of classroom discussion. Some details of the case, including names of the companies, have been disguised. This case is not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of academic or business data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management of the personnel or company.

Only when the custodial staff showed up at his office door did Vinod Mehra realize that it was already 3 am. Vinod is the VP of Supply Chain for Dockomo Heavy Machinery Equipment Limited. He had spent the entire night analyzing the data from the spare parts division in Pune, India. It was April 15 and he had just two weeks to go before the annual review of the company.

The spare parts division's growth at Dockomo has slowed down to about 10 percent annually when compared to the growth rate of 20 percent an nually over the previous years. Their cancelled orders stood at a staggering 8 percent due to parts unavailability, but at the same time the inventory in the system was $6 million higher than the previous year. Vinod was unsure of the response he would receive from the board of directors, since the inventory level increased along with the number of cancelled orders.

At the meeting, the board was considerate, but Vinod was asked to conduct an analysis of the shortcomings and prepare a report on the leading causes for the unavailability of parts to the customers. He was also asked to prepare a report on the approach to be followed to fix these problems by the next quarterly meeting. Vinod was already aware of many issues which existed in the supply chain, but he had to go through a complete analysis to gain a clearer understanding of the shortcomings in their distribution processes.

Illinois Superconductor Corp. a technology start-up, came up with an innovative new superconducting filter for use in cellular base stations. It needed to estimate the demand for its filters. The manager came up with a simple chain-ratio-based forecasting model that, while simple and intuitive, was too simplistic. The company had also commissioned a research firm to develop a model-based forecast. The model-based forecast used diffusion modeling, analogy-based forecasting, and conjoint analysis to create a forecast that incorporated customer preferences, diffusion effects, and competitive dynamics.

To use the data to generate a model-based forecast and to reconcile the model-based forecast with the manager's forecast. Requires sophisticated spreadsheet modeling and the application of advanced forecasting techniques.

This case has been tested twice in the classroom of 40 students in two leading Indian institutions, IIM Ahmedabad (among a group of 40 faculty development programme participants) and Central University of Kashmir (among a group of 40 MBA marketing students). The teaching note has been well prepared and all modifications in both the main case as well as teaching note stand updated.

The data for the case was collected using both primary and secondary sources. The author managed to have a face-to-face interview with the company's Vice President, Mr Sheroy Mehta at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and get the preliminary data for the case. The author could also manage to carry out personal interactions with PureMax mineral water owners, a leading brand in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Some of the supplementary data were sourced from secondary sources and properly referenced.

The discussion questions invite students to consider several environmental challenges often faced by entrepreneurs. Students are encouraged to demonstrate their practical and theoretical knowledge by addressing genuine challenges across a typically broad entrepreneurial management spectrum, including product design, positioning and sustainability. This case was written following extensive interaction with the founding entrepreneurs at Ahmedabad, Gujarat, using a critical marketing perspective and the author's primary research. This case is targeted at postgraduate and undergraduate management students taking a marketing, strategic management or entrepreneurship course.

This case study is relevant for marketing management and brand management courses and could also be used for strategic management classes. This case was written to view the general requirement of the MBA marketing syllabus in most Asian universities in general and Indian universities in particular. This case can also be used for undergraduate students of business management and commerce.

The case focuses on positioning a new brand, the Tata Nano. The car has been widely publicized as the world's cheapest car at Rs.1 lakh. Students must consider the gap between the ultimate target, the huge emerging middle class of Indian consumers, and the limited capacity and distribution available in choosing a target. They also must select between alternative competitive frames and the various points of difference they highlight. The case unfolds in two stages. The first decision point is in 2009, at the launch of the time of the product launch. The second decision point is 18 months later, after production capacity has increased and some product safety issues have arisen.

The primary goal of the case is to illustrate the choices made in developing a strong brand positioning and the interrelationship between these choices. Students select a target and an appropriate competitive frame of reference and point of difference for that target and summarize these elements in a positioning statement. The case also highlights importance of making promotion and distribution decisions that are consistent with the positioning.

This case follows the performance review and financial-statement-forecasting decisions of a Value Line analyst for the retail building-supply industry in October 2002. The case contrasts the strong operating performance of Home Depot with the strong stock-market performance of Lowe's. Students examine a financial ratio analysis for Home Depot that acts as a template to generate a comparable ratio analysis for Lowe's. The student ratio analysis is designed to build intuition with respect to interpreting individual ratios as well as ratio interrelationships (e.g., the DuPont framework). The historical-performance comparison suggests that investors are skeptical of the ability of Home Depot to maintain its performance trajectory, yet they project sustained improvements for Lowe's. Students are invited to scrutinize the analyst's five-year income-statement and asset-side balance sheet forecast for Home Depot. The case expressly focuses on the asset side of the balance sheet as a preview for other cases using free-cash-flow forecasting. The Home Depot forecast exercise exposes students to the mechanics of financial-statement modeling and sensitivity analysis, which they can use in building their own forecast for Lowe's. Finally, the strong-growth assumptions for Home Depot relative to the modest-growth forecast for the industry suggest that the company can be expected to capture massive and perhaps unreasonable market share in the near term. The exercise provides a striking example of the importance of comparing bottom-up business forecasting with top-down industry forecasts.

The case of Bertelsmann China: Supply Chain for Books (A) focuses on one the world's leading media companies to illustrate a widespread problem in the supply chain strategy in extremely fast growing markets. Students learn about the basic challenges of supply chain strategy in an international context. The case covers important fields of management theory. Supply chain designs well as cost and performance drivers are revised by the use of frameworks.