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Optifit, an international brand of fitness equipment, had entered the Indian market in 2010 and had rapidly opened 45 stores in 8 years in the four metros (NCR region, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata). Jaiveer Roy was identified by Pravin Gupta (South Zone head) and Raghav Mehta (HR head) to join as Optifit's Store Manager for its Alwarpet branch, Chennai, a store that had leadership difficulties from the day it started in May 2018. Roy joined the store in May 2018 and did very well soon after his appointment to the store. However, in less than three months, both Roy's and his store's performance began to suffer and his relationship with Gupta began to crumble. This case highlights issues in people management, especially support for people selected for leadership positions and examines the performance indicators of an individual's performance at a broader level. The case also points towards the mistakes or errors leaders may commit vis-a-vis their own role as a leader and mentor.

The case deals with the Supreme Court's decision of August 31, 2012, ordering Sahara to refund Rs. 24,000 crores and interest to SEBI, so as to refund to the real investors. Despite unambiguous orders, Sahara did not comply fully and kept on prolonging the matter using number of pretexts, ultimately resulting in Roy's arrest. The case has been primarily written for easy understanding of facts, principles of corporate governance, and further developments, as mentioned in judgment, which runs into hundreds of pages. It depicts the legal journey of the fight between a company and the financial regulator in the country.

The case highlights the initiatives that can be taken by the management of a large organization to bring more objectivity in promotion policies and to make the process of succession management more scientific. After completing the case, the following teaching objectives should be achieved. Students should be able to comprehend the industrial structure and the key challenges faced by oil and gas industry in an emerging economy – India; students should understand how a large organization can bring objectivity and transparency in its promotion policy by focussing on merit; students can analyse the challenges faced by a large organization in implementing changes in its promotion policy; and students should be able to understand the mechanism of alignment of assessment centres with the promotion policy.

The case deals with bringing change in the competency planning in a large organization. The focus of the case is to explain how a large organization can bring about a radical change in promotion policy especially for employees at the senior positions. The key issue highlighted in the case relates to building competency and linking rewards with merit. The case also highlights the kind of resistance by the stakeholders while enforcing the changes in the organization.

MBA and other similar programmes at the post-graduation level.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human resource management.

Marketing strategy, product positioning, brand building, and economies of scope.

MBA groups, marketing consultants and business management students of undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Abhishek Industries Limited (ABIL) is an entrepreneurial venture of Mr Abhishek Batra that came into being in 1993. ABIL is the leading supplier of Terry Towels to some of world's leading retailers including Wal-Mart, JC Penney and Sears. In spite of some business fluctuations, ABIL has an impressive performance record that is reflected in its financial data. The concern, however, is that of product commoditisation, since established foreign importers and distributors prefer to sell the products under their own brand name. Consequently, even though the export margins may be lucrative; the lack of a brand presence is what bothers the senior management of the company. Given an optimistic domestic business scenario, the senior management is once again evaluating the odds to enter the domestic market using its own brand name. While some of the younger managers are optimistic and want ABIL to emerge as a brand, some senior colleagues are unsure.

The student's skills will be sharpened in working through a problem; it will help the students take an active role of a thinker, analyser, evaluator, decider and implementer; it will assist the students in learning to reason with the given quantitative as well as qualitative data; it will help the students think critically and reason effectively; it will make the students realize that the emphasis is not on solution. Rather, the process of arriving at a solution is more important.

Teaching note.

“What kind of culture does Walt Disney Company (WDC) want to create? This case uses the experiences of a young visitor to one of WDC's resort hotels to set the stage for an analysis of selecting, hiring, training, and retaining and how those practices are governed by the culture of a large American company. The situation provides an opportunity to explore human resource policies, organizational design as well as how all those elements reinforce the culture.

The case opens with an interaction between a young Animal Kingdom Lodge guest and an employee (or cast member as the company refers to employees). There were many different ways the exchange could have unfolded yet the experience was magical for the youngster. What made this exchange a memorable experience for this young guest? Would Walt Disney have been surprised?”

Premal Seth, Head, Human Resources, of Technosol, sat in his Bengaluru office at 9 pm dreading the traffic he would have to negotiate if he stepped outside to catch a bite and equally dreading going up for coffee to the coffee shop 100 meters from his office. It was the first week of April (the week after the finalization of performance appraisals and ratings of all employees) and he would often bump into known and unknown people within the company who were disappointed, upset, sad, or plain angry at how the manager had ranked him/her or how unfair the performance management system was. Deciding not to get up at all, he focused on the various pending grievance emails. As he was going through them, an email from Vasundhara Rao, a senior subject matter expert, located in Ahmedabad, caught his attention (for details about the case characters, refer Exhibit 1).

The learning outcomes are to remember the overall context of global supply chain management from a stakeholder perspective, to understand the context of material handling movement in a mining industry, to apply the overall knowledge of linear programming in a supply chain context, to analyze the different constraints with flow of goods at different nodes in various location hubs and convert the same into the optimization problem and to evaluate carefully the different costs associated at different levels and then finding the optimal solution that minimizes the total cost.

This case proposes a mixed integer multi-echelon analytical model integrated with the scenario tree analysis. The integrated model is used to optimize the allocation of volumes at various stages of the supply chain of exporters of bulk materials like iron ore from Goa, India, to various countries in Asia. The scenario tree analysis is then used to evaluate decisions under certainty with demand as the stochastic parameter. The proposed integrated model has potential for collaboration in the supply chain and facilitating network design, inventory and transportation planning and policy analysis.

This course is suitable at the MBA level for the following courses: Operations Research (Focus/Session: Applications on Supply Chain Management), Supply Chain Management (Focus/Session: Global Supply Chain Management, Logistics Planning, Distribution Network), Logistics Management (Focus/Session: Transportation Planning) nd Operations Strategy (Focus/Session: Location Node Strategy).

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 9: Operations and Logistics.

Strategic management, Strategic marketing, Entrepreneurship and Small business ventures.

This case study will be useful for undergraduate level students majoring in strategic management, entrepreneurship, small business ventures and marketing.

Just Fresh Juice is a small entrepreneurial venture in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), specialising in preparing all-fresh juices, special mixes and fruit salads. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how Just Fresh can maintain its competitive advantage, and how it could sustain its rapid growth in the market and gain more market share in the long run. Just Fresh focuses on satisfying its customers more effectively than its competitors through a competitive strategy of cost leadership (Papulova and Papulova, 2006), direct interaction with the customers through social media (Srinivasan, 2014) and creating a customer experience (Porter, 2008), as delivering a good customer experience is often more effective in building a competitive advantage than optimising internal processes.

The purpose of this case is to enable management students to evaluate and analyse a small business established in the United Arab Emirates. Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of new business set-up and build proper business strategy. They will be able to perform the company’s competitive standing using Porter’s Five competitive forces and analyse its business strategies as well. They will be able to analyse the current status of the company using SWOT analysis and to design alternative strategies for the company using TOWS analysis. Furthermore, students will be able to build a cost analysis model for the company.

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 3: Entrepreneurship.

Human resource development/management and change management, leadership, entrepreneurial development and indigenous innovation.

The case is suitable for final year undergraduate human resource development/management, change management, indigenous innovation, or specialist HRM Master's program (strategic HRM/HRD) students.

The case study highlights the challenges of managing change and growth in India's dynamic business process outsourcing sector. The choice of a small organisation brings to the fore the impact of the strategic decisions owners of capital place on managers as they address issues of sustained growth to support short-term expectations of shareholders. The case highlights India's indigenous approach to frugal innovation or jugaad (finding a creative and improvised work around); how a group of managers consistently reinvented the business model and human resource management practices to stay afloat and meet shareholder expectations.

Depending on the teaching programme and the emphasis of this case in the class, one or more of the following learning outcomes (LO) can be achieved from this case study. These LO have been developed using Bloom's taxonomy and they progressively move from simple to complex LO. Following the case analysis, students should be able to: discuss the key challenges faced by Transcribe and Tally (T&T); identify and analyse the various influences of internal and external factors on training provision; understand the importance of an external network of service provision and identify the key training and organisational capabilities; analyse the dynamic interactions between the various factors and training provision; analyse the relationship between T&T's competitive strategy and its strategic choices (make versus buy) towards investing in training; evaluate the role of training in developing organisational capabilities; and strategize a way forward for Roy Thakur.

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

Incorporated on February 18, 1959, Oil India Ltd. (OIL) was a leading public sector oil and gas company involved in the exploration, development, production and transportation of crude oil and natural gas in India. Since its inception, OIL had committed itself to being a socially responsible organisation in and around operational areas, particularly the north-eastern state of Assam where 90% of company operations were concentrated. Despite many successes, the “People's Company” continued to be a target for disgruntled local and student communities who frequently created operational hazards for the firm—from sit-ins and blockades to pilfering and disrupting production facilities. No less than 400 organisations, of which 50-60 had been consistently active, were currently in the forefront of demanding something from OIL. Many of these demands were beyond the purview of OIL's CSR policy and focus areas. Additionally, being a Public Sector Undertaking (PSU), OIL also faced multiple demands from the government. On February 16, 2019, news arrived that there was yet another blockade in Duliajan, Assam. What should OIL do to address and possibly mitigate operational interruptions?