Introduction Cisco Systems, Inc. is a big player in the Internet technologies field, manufacturing their primary product – the router. Two Stanford computer scientists founded the company in 1984, unbelievably by 1997, Cisco became a fortune 500 company and in the following year Cisco’s market capitalization was over $100 billion dollars. With the gigantic growth experienced Cisco needed to look into their future regarding their existing Enterprise Resource Planning package. Unreliability and common outages brought into question the validity of trying to enlarge the current system to meet the Cisco’s constantly growing needs. The current system was a UNIX-based software package that supported financial, manufacturing, and order-entry systems. An upgrade was made available to Cisco, but would be a fix that offered more reliability and redundancy without maintainability or room for growth. The management structure in 1993 provided that each functional business unit make its own decisions regarding the future of their IT Continue reading
Management Case Studies
Management case studies are real-life examples of issues and problems found in particular workplaces or business organisations. Case study assignments give the opportunity to relate theoretical concepts to practical situations. Most case studies are written in such a way that the reader takes the place of the manager whose responsibility is to make decisions to help solve the problem. In almost all case studies, a decision must be made, although that decision might be to leave the situation as it is and do nothing.
Case Study of Motorola: Brand Revitalization Through Design
When Motorola released its earnings report for the second quarter ending June 2005, analyst and competitors alike were stumped. The company posted revenues of $8.83 billion up from $7.4 billion a year ago and earnings of $993 million against a $203 million loss a year ago. Selling 34 million handsets, the cell phone unit accounted for 55% of the quarterly revenue and $ 498 million in operating earnings. Motorola’s market share increased to 18.1%, a gain of 3.3%, establishing itself firmly as the second largest manufacturer behind Nokia (33% market share). This was an impressive turnaround for a company that had seen market share decline from a high of 51% during 1996 to a low of 13% in 2004 pushing it behind the market leader Nokia and the South Korean rival Samsung. A key contributor to Motorola’s turnaround was the RAZR V3 (Razr), the thinnest phone ever developed. This ultra-slim Continue reading
Case Study: Disney’s Cultural Lessons From Tokyo and Paris
Disney is a worldwide famous cartoon company that was set up by Walter Disney in 1923 in the United States. It has built up the first theme park in California in 1953, which named “Dream World”, it was a big success for the company. Then in Florida, Paris, Tokyo, Hongkong and other places, Disney theme parks have been set up and welcomed by both the young and the adult. So far, it has about 60-year experience of operating multi-nationally. Although Disneyland is not the pioneer of theme parks, Disney creates a lot of colorful animation and cartoon figures which appeal to a lot of people to come and enjoy their lives in the theme parks. According to this, Disney especially Disneyland acquires much more success in the commercial world, for visitors brought great wealth and spread its culture abroad to every corner of this modern world. Successful Cross-cultural Management of Continue reading
Case Study on E-Business Transformation: Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems is the network vendor for many institutions — yet they now also provide products and services for home networking. At the beginning history of Cisco Systems, the corporation’s goals were to build-up easiness in accessing the information using various electronic information channels, especially computer, inside the Stanford campus. Along with the growth of the firm, the management hired many talented employees. They formalized their business plan covering four strategic goals (provide complete solution for businesses, make acquisitions a structured process, define the industry-wide networking protocols, and form the right strategic alliances). Based on that strategy, they want to become “e-business” leaders in their industry. Cisco use several distribution channels to deliver its products and services such as personal selling, third-party distributors, resellers, service providers, and system integrators. Since Cisco plays in the networking products, they try to provide customers with a great possible flexibility of product or service Continue reading
Zara’s Lean Operation: Source of Competitive Advantage
Fashion giant, Zara, forms part of the retail group ‘Grupo Inditex’ which is one of the “largest, fastest growing and successful” clothing retailers across Europe. Grupo Inditex is formulated by an amalgamation of major high street names from across Europe, including Zara, Pull and Bear and Bershka, in total boasting 3,825 stores across 68 countries.Zara’s success story begins by offering a product range capable of catering for men, women and children, providing affordable and stylish clothes whatever the season. Coupled with this, is their keen eye for discovering new fashion trends and translating these trends from the catwalk to the high street, both quickly and affordably. Zara boasts a marketing strategy of firstly product variety with a focal point of ensuring speed to market. At present, Zara launch 10,000 new articles per year across their portfolio of stores. Finally, store location, as any marketing is left to store location rather Continue reading
Case Study: Disney’s Diversification Strategy
The story of Disney is that of a company founded in 1923 by the Disney brothers, Walt and Roy. In the beginning, the company was referred to as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio and later incorporated as Walt Disney Productions in 1929. Walt Disney Productions made its mark for many years in the animation industry before venturing into television and live-action film production. Something else also happened before Walt had the breakthrough with Mickey Mouse. Before Mickey, there was Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit. But because he didn’t own the copyright, Walt lost the rights to Oswald, a bitter lesson that was to shape his company positively in the future. That experience thought him very early the value of intellectual property and Disney has used that knowledge to tighten controls over its properties as well as build defense against entrants and competing incumbents. The characters at Disney are well protected and Continue reading