One of the founders of a small business owners' purchasing cooperative organized four months earlier, was reflecting on its successful performance. The members of the co-op were willing to share responsibilities in the management of the co-op's primary activities of obtaining price quotes, invoicing members, and making delivery arrangements. The members were currently considering the possibility of extending the types of materials purchased .....more

Spreadsheet for product 9B09N022.

TISM Solutions Inc. is a dot-com company that connects buyers and sellers of expert advice through the Web site Timeismoney.com. The founders of the company spent many hours turning their concept into a business plan and, with the support and funding of Vision Venture Capital (VVC), have drafted their vision statement, technology infrastructure and business model - focusing on the business-to-consumer model. However, investors wanted more stable and .....more

In October 2008, the senior vice-president for product and business development at IA Clarington (IAC), a life and health insurance company, was preparing for a meeting with the president of IAC. The topic of discussion would be IAC's Target Click Fund, a mutual fund with an options-based guarantee structure targeted towards investors who were looking for growth along with capital preservation. The vice-president had been asked to render his opinion .....more

Dexter Nelson recently accepted a summer analyst position at PPC Consulting (PPC) in Toronto, and was excited to take on the challenge in a high-performance organization. It had only been a few days since he had started his internship when the rest of Dexter Nelson's team left to conduct primary research at a client site. Left alone to work on his first real project, he began to feel overwhelmed. Having recognized the project as a new product .....more

Teaching note for product 9B09M034.

Teaching note for product 9B08C017.

The vice-president of operations at Lighting Group Corporation (LGC) was looking over some financial statements at the end of the workday. For the first time he could remember, there were no sales recorded on the daily sales statement. It appeared that the efforts of employees were diverted into a project related to the scrap metal that was a by-product of the manufacturing process. To complicate matters, the son of the company's president and .....more

Robert's Center of Performing Arts (RCPA), founded and owned by Robert Gernburd, was a music school. In addition to individual instrument lessons and group lessons in music theory and music history, the RCPA sold second-hand pianos. It was difficult to find a supplier of used pianos but after a great deal of research, Gernburd found a supplier in Japan. Recently, an invoice containing supplier information had been temporarily misplaced. Since .....more

Teaching note for product 9B08M023.