This case is appropriate for courses that focus on the areas of environmental sustainability and systems thinking. Students explore how the structure and information flows in the shrimp industry can create boom and bust performance. Key decision-making policies by industry participants and...

This file contains slides that show the elements chosen by the senior management and consultants to re-engage and re-launch the lean journey at Wausau Equipment Company, following its original failed implementation and necessitated by implementation and acceptance problems at the management level

The lean initiative detailed in the (A) case, OM-1354, had reached a precarious stage. Despite an optimistic business forecast, there was a disturbing trend developing: the Machine and Systems division of Wausau Equipment Company (WECO) had failed to sell several harvesting systems to customers...

Business entities must continually respond to shifts in the competitive landscape. When internal or external pressures cause a company to undertake an operational improvement process such as Six Sigma or Lean, managing the human aspects of implementation is critical. Change management in an...

The C case in this series (see also the A [UVA-OB-0591] and B [UVA-OB-0592] cases) describes the results of the changes that Bob Bellhouse, general manager of the public telephone business of New York Telephone, made in response to a series of difficult problems he faced: increasing competition,...

Bob Bellhouse, general manager of Public Communications at New York Telephone (PubCom), leads a five-year transformation of his organization from a "backwater, laissez-faire operation" into a high-performance business unit. Before the divestiture of AT&T, in 1984, PubCom had suffered from low...

This case series (see also the A [UVA-OM-1107], B [UVA-OM-1110], C [UVA-OM-1111], D [UVA-OM-1112], E [UVA-OM-1113], and F [UVA-OM-1156] cases) focuses students on the boom-and-bust behaviors in the Northern Forest sawmill industry. Stakeholders, from landowners to sawmill owners to government...