Case studies

Carolina Lunker Sauce is a new product attempting to break into the fishing attractants category. The company founders are evaluating cutting the retail price of the product in order to secure distribution. Analyzing this decision forces the leaders of this struggling company to evaluate their overall new product strategy and the product’s positioning in the market.

To focus on new product strategy, positioning, and pricing.

This case presents the history and recent governance challenges of Carvajal, S.A., a Colombia-based, family-owned, billion-dollar-plus holding company that had offered printing-related (e.g., Yellow Pages, notebooks) and other products and services across and beyond South America for more than a century. Specifically, the case details the company’s state of affairs in early 2011, a time by which Carvajal’s flagship businesses had matured rapidly with the emergence of digital technology and diminished demand for paper/print-based products. Though profits and growth remained positive, Carvajal’s leaders knew that upholding the business’s legacy of returns, dividends for all family members, and extensive philanthropy would take significant strategy and execution.

Compounding the strategy issues, Carvajal faced these market challenges with new leadership: the first non-family CEO since the company’s inception. Well-established Colombian executive Ricardo Obregon had been hired in 2008 over two family candidates to lead the business. Obregon was to oversee a complex governance network that included a holding company with seven operating companies, their management and respective boards, a family council, and 280 members (including spouses) of a shareholding family in its sixth generation. Carvajal’s business and family leaders had to face market issues and decisions that included the possibility of taking public the operating companies and/or the holding company while maintaining the business’s long traditions of unity, respect, strong ethics, and philanthropy. That meant optimizing several crucial relationships: between the family and the new CEO; between the family and the board; between the operating companies and the holding company; and between members of the large Carvajal family, many of whom now resided outside of Colombia and Latin America.

Understand general and specific challenges associated with carrying on a longstanding family business facing multiple market challenges; explore the process of engaging a complex family-business governance network to handle business challenges while maintaining family values; consider the effects of culture on a multi-generation family business.

This case and its companion, “Myerson Industries” (UVA-QA-0299), constitute the materials for a negotiating exercise. The exercise is a distributive-bargaining situation surrounding the negotiation of the price for the construction of a building (some minor opportunities exist for creating mutual value).

The managing director of a steel plant faces the decision of how much of each raw material to order for the plant for the following month. Due to lower and upper bounds on the amounts of each raw material in a batch and varying amounts of electricity and time consumed for different raw materials, one can't simply use the cheapest raw material. A linear program and the solver optimization function of Excel will provide the optimal amounts that meet the constraints. Interestingly, the best mixture for a batch is not the best mixture for a monthly plan. Shadow prices indicate the value of relaxing constraints. The typical monthly model from a student will be nonlinear, although it can be written as a linear model. This case provides the basis for an introductory class on linear programming and linear versus nonlinear models.

Brad Powell, the newly hired senior leader of a Christian church, must lead the organization to reverse a three-decade decline and return to fulfilling its mission. Brad spent the first six months assessing the situation, building relationships, and reiterating the longstanding mission of the organization. Now, with an understanding of its history, an intimate knowledge of the immediate challenges, and a clear vision of what the organization should become, Brad is considering his strategy and next steps. As the leader of a nonprofit organization resourced by members and volunteers, Brad must lead change that produces results without compromising the mission. The B case summarizes Brad's actions and the results.

To allow students to evaluate Brad's situation and advise him on the best plan for leading change at Temple Baptist Church. To demonstrate the impact of a leader on an organization's culture, and the fit between an organization's style and its mission. To allow discussion of the paradoxes a leader must manage in changing a culture, measuring financial versus nonprofit results, leading volunteers versus paid staff, upholding mission versus tradition, and leading change with limited resources.

Shows how a regional family company threatened by national competition must make changes to its structure and way of doing business or face extinction or sale.

The case concerns a real $25 million program consisting of nine concurrent projects to deliver and implement a custom-built in-store customer relationship management (CRM) system and a new point-of-sale system in 400 stores of a national retail chain. The name of the company has been disguised for confidentiality reasons. Once deployed, the new system should give Clothes ‘R’ Us a significant strategic advantage over competitors in the marketplace; it will increase in-store manager productivity, cut costs, and ultimately drive increased sales for the retail chain. The program is in crisis, however, because the product managers have just left to join a competitor. The explicit details of the program are given, including examples of best practice program governance and the real activity network diagram for the program. Detailed Excel spreadsheets are also provided with the actual earned value data for the program. Students analyze the spreadsheets and the data given in the case to diagnose the impact of the most recent risk event and past risk events that occurred in the program. Ultimately students must answer the essential executive questions: What is wrong with the program? How should it be fixed, and what is the impact in time and money to the program? In addition, qualitative warning signs are given throughout the case—these warning signs are red flags to executives for early proactive intervention in troubled projects.

The goal of the case is to teach complex program oversight. Students analyze actual earned value data for a real $25 million program consisting of nine concurrent programs and assess the impact of risk events as they occur in the program. A key takeaway of the case is that relatively simple tools (Excel spreadsheets and time tracking) combined with good project planning can be used to effectively control very complex projects. Students also learn the qualitative warning signs within programs that can serve as early indicators of problems.

How does a mature business develop new growth markets, assuming it already has new products? That was the challenge facing The Coca-Cola Company and its global system of bottlers in the 2000s when demand for its core line of carbonated soft drinks flattened. The Australian bottler, Amatil, pinned its hopes on energy drinks, a fast-growth, youth-oriented category that was capturing headlines and share away from traditional products. To wrest control from the upstart brands that originated them, Amatil was targeting the retail context where young people congregated and formed their preferences, in pubs, nightclubs, healthclubs, and sporting events. This international case explores the challenges encountered when a mature company with considerable distribution assets, well-honed systems, and entrenched operating procedures attempts to sell into an underserved retail channel with requirements quite unlike those of the company's mainstream buyers. How does it attract market interest? How does it develop new routes-to-market without undercutting the cost efficiencies and delivery value that have earned it dominant position elsewhere? How does it win over what could be its core customers of the future without alienating today's faithful? These are just some of the questions that Amatil management was determined to solve.

Understand issues related to retail channel strategy development in fast-changing international consumer markets, and the challenges of adapting legacy routes-to-market systems to changing consumer demands.

Colfax Corporation was a young, privately held collection of pump-manufacturing companies from the United States and Europe. Intending to go public, it was eager to find a story for investors of how it could grow at rates faster than its subsidiaries had historically grown in their home regions and core-customer industrial markets. This case describes a singular new-growth opportunity: selling Colfax solutions into state-owned petroleum enterprises in the Middle East at a time when these producers were straining to add capacity. Designing the optimal marketing system required Colfax to weigh a complex of issues, including global resource allocation and deployment, a process for customer-relationship building, and estimates for revenue streams versus investment outlays. The design process was, in short, far more than “sticking sales rep pins in the map.” Case readers are asked to think along with the Colfax global management team in deciding, “How much can we afford to risk our current income model in order to build new capacity in a new region in a new way?”

Understanding issues related to global B2B marketing channel strategy development, as well as complexities of entering unfamiliar new international markets such as Middle East oil and gas.

In December 2001, after a six-month process of vying for AT&T's Broadband, the president of cable operator Comcast Corporation, had just received word that Comcast's $72-billion offer had won the auction. Comcast, the cable industry's third-largest operator, would merge with industry leader AT&T Broadband to form a company with more than $20 billion in revenue and an unparalleled distribution (a presence in 22 of the nation's top 25 markets). Now the presidents of both companies began to consider their post-merger integration strategies. What was important and how should they prioritize their activities? How could they get all stakeholders to understand the rationale for the deal and its business goals and excited about the new AT&T Comcast?