The vice-president of an American logistics services provider considers establishing this service in Mexico where the logistics market is controlled by the banks and is very underdeveloped. He must decide whether to establish a greenfield operation or enter a joint venture. Issues of target segments and positioning also needed resolution.

General Optica Internacional is considering the possibility of centralizing its production of glasses (lens fitting) instead of decentralizing the work to optician. Centralization saves costs but may give rise to service problems.

Three entrepreneurs have started up a logistics company specializing in the textile industry. Having come through the start-up and early growth stages successfully, the question now facing the company is how to establish itself as a major player in its industry.

The Logistics and Distribution unit of Xerox's Business Systems Group was gaining 3% to 5% a year in productivity - not good enough in light of industrywide price cuts in business machines. One solution, benchmarking, measures L&D's warehouse and distribution performance against comparable activities in other industries. After a search, L&D found the best warehousing and materials handling organization was at L.L. Bean. By looking closely at the ...

This composite case explores the managerial, ethical, and logistical issues that arise when a federal employee is diagnosed with breast cancer and has difficulty dealing with her job responsibilities and co-worker reactions. The case ends with the employee on the verge of exhausting her leave options; she and the manager must work out a solution. An appendix discusses the relevance of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Rehabilita...

This case explores the use of social media to support product design, customer support, marketing and HR activities at National Instruments (NI). Based in Austin, Texas, with over $1 billion in 2011 sales, NI designs, produces, and sells software and hardware platforms that simplify development of its customers measurement and control systems. Its customers, ranging from individuals (professors and their students) to large corporations, consist p...

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical mod...

Ever since retailers equipped their cash registers with bar code scanners, we've been promised a brave new world of supply chain management, one free of stockouts and overstocked warehouses. But inaccurate data are sabotaging this vision.

Sooner or later, most companies can't attain the growth rates expected by their boards and CEOs and demanded by investors. To some extent, such businesses are victims of their own successes. Many were able to sustain high growth rates for a long time because they were in high-growth industries. But once those industries slowed down, the businesses could no longer deliver the performance that investors had come to take for granted. Often, companie...

Five wagons with 760 drums had to be allocated in containers, each with 60 drums, without splitting the 83 lots of 8 to 12 drums each.