Medtronic Case Writeup 1) What were the root causes of why Medtronic nearly lost its position as market leader in the 1970’s and 1980’s? Medtronic was not the market leader in the 1970’s and 1980’s because of a combination of unique industry factors and the lack of a sufficient product planning/development system in place at Medtronic. In the market, competition from other companies was rapidly increasing during this time. As such, technologies were always changing, and there were higher expectations [for product quality and differentiation] for newly released products. Meanwhile, at Medtronic, their product development was falling behind.
⦁ E-Drive They have experience in the market. The quality is in the average of the market and. The company also offers an improved production systems and the lead-time is very flexible. The proximity with PSC is a plus. Additionally, the company has a strong reputation in product development.
In supply chain management, strategic capacity planning controls the demand of new opportunities at minimal cost (Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano, 2006). Strategic capacity planning is essential in establishing the permanent capacity capability a business needs to maintain or improve its market share. Poorly planned capacity needs can help the competition, costing the business customers (Chase, Jacobs, and Aquilano, 2006). Performing a break-even analysis would assist Riordan in calculating the proper capacity needs of their
The industry wide capacity is growing much faster than the demand growth. Three main causes to the isolation of IT Department Strategy to the whole business plan are analyzed as follows. To begin with, the matter of money counted for the most obvious excuse for the blackout of previously on-going Leapfrog Project. Actually, the problem is that RCCL did not figure out how best to spend its budgets, not just to meet growing demand but to boost repeat bookings. Further more, the decision of shelving the whole Leapfrog plan indicated that RCCL lost its
The fabrication phases and the assembly and test phase consist of their own procedures. Nowadays manufacturing process becomes more and more technologically diverse and intense. It results in a decrease in a direct labor percentage of total manufacturing cost. Management considered that an inaccuracy of GEI’s standard cost system caused a poor financial performance. The company need find a better cost system which could truly track costs and identify which of products were profitable and which were not.
Simon Kovecki was in charge of implementing this new system, but he ended up with failure that left MidSouth Chamber of Commerce (MSCC) with lost data on the old systems, and an inoperable UNITRAK system. This case study illustrates the problems that MSCC went through after acquiring the UNITRAK system. In writing this report on the challenges of implementing a new operational system I hope to have a better understanding of maintaining documentation and organizational structure. The Midsouth Chamber of Commerce case is about the complexities when implementing a new technology system and the challenges when technology systems fail. Since the implementation of the Unitrak software, Midsouth Chamber of Commerce has continued to make incompetent management decisions, when it is related to building an IT infrastructure, for their
This external pressure incentivized Newell to optimize their supply chain and maximize supply efficiency, which led to systems like cross-docking. The threat of new competition and the threat of other products/services went hand in hand with how Newell was perceived by their customer. If a Wal-Mart, say, were displeased with an aspect of Newell’s performance they would pressure Newell by threatening to allow a competitor into the supply chain to stock some stores. Given the relatively un-differentiated nature of Newell products substitute suppliers were not hard to find. In essence, any market player that was operationally similar with a comparable, or superior, portfolio of products was a threat for Newell.
Obviously it is evident that Henkel Iberica current process isn’t working due to challenges of forecast exactness and demand variability for all the products it offers. The evidence is clear in the data from 2000 to 2001 as overall sales increased 2.2% but net earnings decreased by 5.7%. For a company to be profitable, focus should be on net earnings and not sales and providing a wide range of products to satisfy every customer. The loss of earnings is most likely due to not having the right product mix and volume at the right time as well as lack of communication between sales and
Hypothesis 7: Enterprises do not agree with respect to the factors acting as barrier to the SCM implementation. In order to pinpoint the obstacles and bottlenecks, and to achieve superior performance, organizations embrace benchmarking as a strategic tool (Rigby, 2013). Shirley (1996) defined benchmarking as a continuous and systematic process in which an organization’s processes or practices are compared with its rivals having a better position in the marketplace, to discover the best way to perform a particular activity or process. Benchmarking imparts better comprehension of the current practices of the organization and allows the firms to re-engineer their business processes, so that they can attain best-in-class performance or beyond
Chapter 3 Case: The Dim Lighting Co. Arshini Dhambarage Baker College Chapter 3 Case: The Dim Lighting Co. Name: Jim West 1. Problems A. Micro * Short sightedness of the Accounting and Manufacturing departments. * Competitor threats. B. Macro * Profit margin dropped by 15% (poor financial situation) * Company is not in a position to spend the capital necessary to fund the project. * The potential resignation of Robert Spinks if the project is not funded.