...BaselineScience.com B a s e l i n e S c i e n c e , I n c . • w w w. b a s e l i n e s c i e n c e . c o m Matching Dell: A Strategic Case Analysis Dan Demers GS 604, Thursday 5:00 – 7:20 Matching Dell: Dell’s Key Strategic Issues At the close of the case, Dell is presented with two key strategic issues. The first strategic issue facing Dell is the movement of rivals seeking to mimic Dell’s direct sales model, while the second strategic issue is the declining trend in pricing in the Personal Computer Industry and the effects this trend will have on the operations and profitability of both Dell and Dell’s Rivals. In this case analysis, I recommend that Dell answer these issues by assuming a Cost Leadership in a Broad Market strategy to win the price war on cost, establish strategic relationships with system integrators and resellers to counter the product diversification threat of multi-offering Rivals, and strengthen its brand presence internationally to enable continued market growth. Personal Computer Industry: Industry Structure Analysis In this analysis, I define the Personal Computer Industry as that which is comprised of computer manufacturers responsible for the assembly of personal computers, either in entirety or with the assistance of contractors or channel partners. Dell is included in this definition, as are Dell’s Rivals highlighted in the case. In applying Michael Porter’s Five Forces Modeli, it is clear that the Personal Computer Industry is largely unfavorable...
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...com B a s e l i n e S c i e n c e , I n c . • w w w. b a s e l i n e s c i e n c e . c o m Matching Dell: A Strategic Case Analysis Dan Demers GS 604, Thursday 5:00 – 7:20 Matching Dell : D ell’s Key Strategic Issue s At the close of the case, Dell is presented with two key strategic issues. The first strategic issue facing Dell is the movement of rivals seeking to mimic Dell’s direct sales model, while the second strategic issue is the declining trend in pricing in the Personal Computer Industry and the effects this trend will have on the operations and profitability of both Dell and Dell’s Rivals. In this case analysis, I recommend that Dell answer these issues by assuming a Cost Leadership in a Broad Market strategy to win the price war on cost, establish strategic relationships with system integrators and resellers to counter the product diversification threat of multi-offering Rivals, and strengthen its brand presence internationally to enable continued market growth. Personal Computer Industry : Industry Structure Analysis In this analysis, I define the Personal Computer Industry as that which is comprised of computer manufacturers responsible for the assembly of personal computers, either in entirety or with the assistance of contractors or channel partners. Dell is included in this definition, as are Dell’s Rivals highlighted in the case. In applying Michael Porter’s Five Forces Modeli, it is clear that the Personal Computer Industry is largely...
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...The Power of Virtual Integration: An Interview with Dell Computer’s Michael Dell by Joan Magretta Harvard Business Review Reprint 98208 The Power of V i r t ua l I n t e g r at i o n : A n I n t e rv i e w w i t h D e l l C o m p u t e r’ s Michael Dell b y J oa n M ag r e t ta H ow do you create a $12 billion company in just 1 3 years? Michael Dell began in 1984 with a simple business insight: he could by- pass the dealer channel through which personal computers were then being sold. Instead, he would sell directly to customers and build products to order. In one swoop, Dell eliminated the reseller’s markup and the costs and risks associated with carrying large inventories of finished goods. The formula became known as the direct business model, and it gave Dell Computer Corporation a substantial cost advantage. The direct model turned out to have other benefits that even Michael Dell couldn’t have anticipated when he founded his company. “You actually get to have a relationship with the customer,” he explains. “And that creates valuable information, which, in turn, allows us to leverage our relationships with both ARTWORK BY NATALIE ASCENCIOS Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. t h e p ow e r o f v i r t ua l i n t e g r at i o n : suppliers and customers. Couple that information with technology, and you have the infrastructure to revolutionize the fundamental business models ...
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...THE iPREMIER COMPANY (A): Denial of Service Attack By Robert Austin November 19, 2003 DPDN Brian Dyrud Jennifer Paterson Paul Davidson Lindsay Neal BACKGROUND: iPremier, a Seattle based company, was founded in 1994 by two students from Swathmore College. iPremier had become one of the only success stories of web-based commerce, selling luxury, rare, and vintage goods over the Internet. Most of iPremier’s goods sell for under $200 and the customer buys the products online with his or her credit card. iPremier’s competitive advantage is their flexible return policies which allows the customer to thoroughly check out the product and make a decision to keep the product or return it. The majority of iPremier customers are high end and credit limits are not a problem, which also adds to the competitive advantage of utilizing their entire customer base. During 1999 the company reached a profit of $2.1 million on sales of $32 million. Sales had increased by 50% during the last three years and they were in an upward trend. iPremier’s stock nearly tripled after the company’s Initial Public Offering in 1998 and had continued to grow since the IPO, and eventually the stock tripled again. iPremier was one of the few companies to survive the technical stock recession of 2000. Management at iPremier consisted of young people who had been with the company from the start and a group of experienced managers that were brought in over time as the company grew. IPremier’s...
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...Read and Download PDF File Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution PDF Ebook Library TELETECH CORPORATION CASE STUDY SOLUTION Download: TELETECH CORPORATION CASE STUDY SOLUTION / PDF Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution in addition to the lessons as well as textbooks are basically 2 sides of the very same coin. The classes as well as textbook assist you construct a strong structure on which to be analyzed on. Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution on the other hand, allow you to place this expertise to practical usage. Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution allows you to create in all the relevant locations. The wonderful aspect of Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution are their cost. They are not horribly expensive and evaluating that against their worth, you could not actually pay for to be without them. They are excellent for bringing a context to the course and also aiding you establish your understanding of the training course as a whole. The other alternative which is much less preferable is to examine the program in a bit-by-bit way which is a danger when it pertains to evaluation day. Doing this is likely to leave gaps in your understanding of the program. Utilizing the Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution assists draw all this know-how together into a relevant context and also it is fundamental in developing a further understanding of the topic. One more fantastic aspect of Teletech Corporation Case Study Solution are that taking a particular course...
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...Harvard Business School 9-799-158 June 6, 1999 D Matching Dell O N Between 1994 and 1998, the revenue of Dell Computer Corporation rose from $3.5 billion to $18.2 billion, and profits increased from $149 million to $1.5 billion. The company’s stock price rose by 5,600%. During the same period, Dell grew twice as fast as its major rivals in the personal computer market and tripled its market share. In the first half of 1998, Dell reported operating earnings that were greater than the personal computer earnings of Compaq, Gateway, Hewlett1 Packard, and IBM combined. On Forbes magazine’s list of the richest Americans, Michael Dell, the 33-year-old founder of Dell Computer, ranked fourth with an estimated worth of $13 billion. He trailed only Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Paul Allen on the list and was worth more than Gates had 2 been at the same age. O Dell Computer had pioneered the widely publicized “Direct Model” in the personal computer (PC) industry. While competitors sold primarily through distributors, resellers, and retail sites, Dell took orders directly from customers, especially corporate customers. Once it received an order, Dell rapidly built computers to customer specifications and shipped machines directly to the customer. T The success of the Direct Model attracted the intense scrutiny of Dell’s competitors. By 1997, headlines such as “Now Everyone in PCs Wants to Be Like Mike,” “Compaq Reengineers the Channel: Will...
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...In te r n a ti o n a l J o u r n a l o f M a n a g e me n t C a s es BOOTSTRAP FINANCING: FOUR CASE STUDIES OF TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES EVA M.TOMORY UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, CANADA Abstract Innovative businesses, especially in the early stages of their life cycles, often encounter difficulty in obtaining long-term external financing. Their founders tend to seek financing through nontraditional bootstrapping methods to launch their ventures. Bootstrap financing refers to a range of creative ways to acquire resources without relying on borrowing money or raising equity from traditional sources (Freear et al., 1995a). The paper examines how successful technology entrepreneurs used bootstrap financing: the founders of Microsoft Corporation, Apple Inc., Dell Inc. and Research in Motion Ltd. The research investigates the elements of bootstrapping as described in Freear et al. (1995a) and in Winborg and Landström (2001), finding that entrepreneurs use bootstrapping extensively during the early stages of growth for both product and business developments. Bootstrapping methods change as the business develops with certain methods used more at the beginning of the life cycle, and different variations used as the business starts to grow. The study also points out that even the most successful technology-based consumer goods businesses relied on bootstrap financing at the early stages of their development. This technique deserves more attention from the scholarly community since it is certain...
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...For exclusive use Universidad Panamericana, 2015 Harvard Business School 9-101-029 September 5, 2000 Financial Statement and Ratio Analysis Financial ratios are a popular way for users of financial statements to develop insights into the financial performance of companies. By controlling for the effect of firm size on the level of performance, ratios enable financial statement users to examine how a firm has performed relative to its peers and relative to its own historical performance. A firm’s ratios can differ from its peers or its own historical performance because it has selected a different product market strategy, because its management team has become more effective at implementing its strategy, or because it has selected a different financial strategy. Of course, as we have seen throughout the course, sometimes firms can appear to perform differently because they have selected different accounting methods for reporting the same underlying economic events. For this reason, a precursor to effective financial ratio analysis is the development of a clear understanding of how a firm’s accounting decisions compare with those of its competitors, or with its own decisions in prior years. If there are important differences in accounting decisions, it may be necessary to make adjustments to the affected firms’ financial statements to ensure that ratio comparisons isolate differences in strategy or performance. Common adjustments include: treating operating...
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...------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- Ford Motor Company Case Report ------------------------------------------------- Executive Summary Ford Motor Company has a long history, starting in Michigan in 1903. They have focused on designing and manufacturing and have been very successful, however with increasing competition, global markets and over-capacity the company needs to look at ways to improve profitability. The company has implemented various programs and processes to create a lean, responsive system with better consumer forecasting. Their challenge is to continue to research ways to stay viable in current market and industry conditions. Dell Computers has been very successful with a direct model and virtual integration that may or not work well for Ford. CONTENTS * ISSUE 3 * ANALYSIS 4 * ALTERNATIVES 6 * RECOMMENDATIONS 7 * IMPLEMENTATION 8 * CONCLUSION 8 * REFERENCES 9 * ISSUE: The Ford Motor Company is facing a number of challenges including the direction of CEO Jac Nasser to focus on customer responsiveness and shareholder value to deal with increasing competitiveness, an industry with potential over-capacity and the expansion into globalized markets. Ford had begun to implement systems to reduce cycle-time, improve quality and to lower costs. Programs included consolidating product development into five Vehicle Centres (VCs), reeingineered...
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... SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IN IT APPLICATIONS SUMMER 2 2014 Case 1 Ford Motor Company: Supply Chain Strategy Assignment Questions: 1. Based on your reading of the Harvard Business Review interview with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers, what is your conclusion about the advantages Dell derives from virtual integration? How important are these advantages in the auto business? Explanation: Michael Dell’s insight on innovative combination of customer focus, supplier partnership, mass customization and just in time manufacturing enabled the coordination across company’s boundaries to achieve new levels of efficiency and productivity as well as extraordinary returns to investors. Michael dell termed it as virtual integration. Virtual...
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...Formulation and Implementation MBA 980 Spring, 2009 Professor Jay Dial Office 860 Fisher Hall Email dial.12@osu.edu Phone 292-5438 Reading packet There is a required reading packet available at Uniprint-Tuttle Park that includes course readings, cases and lecture notes for classroom discussion. This is copyrighted material and each student must purchase an individual copy of the reading packet. Additional highly recommended readings will be selected from Management Skills: A Jossey-Bass Reader (ISBN # 0-7879-7341-6). It is available from both BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com. Course Overview This course is about the creation and maintenance of long term value for the organization. It is concerned with both the determination of the strategic direction of the firm and the management of the strategic process. The course builds on prior studies of functional areas while recognizing that most real business problems are inherently multi-functional in nature. Thus, this course employs an explicitly integrative approach in which we adopt the role of the general manager who has the responsibility for the long-term health of the entire organization. The course would be taught primarily through the case method of instruction. Course Objectives 1. Understand the nature of strategic competitiveness and develop the ability to analyze the competitive environment facing a firm, assess the attractiveness of the industry and isolate potential sources of...
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...Formulation and Implementation MBA 980 Spring, 2009 Professor Jay Dial Office 860 Fisher Hall Email dial.12@osu.edu Phone 292-5438 Reading packet There is a required reading packet available at Uniprint-Tuttle Park that includes course readings, cases and lecture notes for classroom discussion. This is copyrighted material and each student must purchase an individual copy of the reading packet. Additional highly recommended readings will be selected from Management Skills: A Jossey-Bass Reader (ISBN # 0-7879-7341-6). It is available from both BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com. Course Overview This course is about the creation and maintenance of long term value for the organization. It is concerned with both the determination of the strategic direction of the firm and the management of the strategic process. The course builds on prior studies of functional areas while recognizing that most real business problems are inherently multi-functional in nature. Thus, this course employs an explicitly integrative approach in which we adopt the role of the general manager who has the responsibility for the long-term health of the entire organization. The course would be taught primarily through the case method of instruction. Course Objectives 1. Understand the nature of strategic competitiveness and develop the ability to analyze the competitive environment facing a firm, assess the attractiveness of the industry and isolate potential sources of...
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...concentrate all their attention on attracting customers rather than retaining them. That's a mistake. The unique economics of e-business make customer loyalty more important than ever. by Frederick F. Reichheld and Phil Schefter L OYALTY MAY NOT BE THE FIRST * idea that pops into your head when you think ahout electronic commerce. After all, what relevance could such a quaint, oldfashioned notion hold for a world in which customers defect at the click of a mouse and impersonal shopping hots scour databases for ever hetter deals? What good is a small-town virtue amid the faceless anonymity of the Internet's HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW July-August 2000 glohal marketplace? Loyalty must he on a fast track toward extinction, right? Not at all. Chief executives at the cutting edge of e-commerce-from Dell Computer's Michael Dell to eBay's Meg Whitman, from Vanguard's Jack Brennan to Grainger's Richard Keyser-care deeply about customer retention and consider it vital to the success of their on-line operations. They know that loyalty 105 E-Loyalty: Your Secret Weapon on the Web is an economic necessity: acquiring customers on the Internet is enormously expensive, and unless those customers stick around and make lots of repeat purchases over the years, profits will remain elusive. They also know it's a competitive necessity: in every industry, some company will figure out how to harness the potential of the Weh to create exceptional value...
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...| Managerial Marketing | | Case Study: DELL New Horizons | Case Study: DELL New Horizons Questions 1- What has made Dell Succeed to date? Up to 2002 The key to Dell’s success to date was its innovative direct business model, which focused on selling Dell products directly to customers rather than through intermediaries. Dell believed so called “middlemen” added little to no value to the end product and that their associated fees were essentially unnecessary mark-ups for customers. By completely cutting out intermediaries, Dell not only reduced its customers’ costs, but also enabled the company to customize computers and focus on meeting customers’ needs and providing superior customer service. So doing ultimately helped Dell establish itself as one of the most customer-centric information technology companies in operation. When it came to product development technology, Dell did not aspire to be the industry pioneer. Instead, Dell left product innovation to its competitors and relied on its unique marketing distribution formula to generate sales. The intuition of Dell’s top management, especially Dell’s namesake and CEO, Michael Dell, contributed significantly to the effectiveness of this formula. As noted in the case, Dell had the “uncanny ability to reach out into the market and identify the next high-margin technology product that could be driven to scale with lower priced products driven by its direct model.” This foresight basically eliminated Dell’s need...
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...MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS Read the following case study and then answer Questions 1 - 5 which follow: DELL COMPUTER Michael Dell founded Dell in 1984 while he was still a college student at the University of Texas in Austin. From the beginning, Dell sold directly to_th_e final customer and built PCs to users' specifications. This basic business model has not changed over the years, although it has been modified and refined as the company has grown. Dell started with telephone sales of upgraded IBM compatible PCs, and then shifted to assembling and marketing its own brand of PCs in 1985. It provided customers with a 24-hour hotline for complaints and guaranteed 24- to 48-hour shipment of replacement parts. As its customer base grew, Dell also implemented a direct toll-free technical support line. In 1990, Dell shifted course when it began selling through retail outlets such as CompUSA, Circuit City, and Price Club. Revenues grew rapidly, but problems arose in managing what had become a billion-dollar company, and Dell experienced its first quarterly loss in 1993 (Dell, 1999). In 1994, Dell concluded that even though it was successful selling through retail channels, it was not making money doing so. Dell decided to withdraw from the retail market and return to its roots as a direct seller, a move that not only helped the company's profitability but also enabled it to put all of its efforts into executing the direct model. Dell also brought in a new chief operating officer,...
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