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Ducati

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MARCH 9, 2015

ANTHONY J. MAYO
MICHAEL J. ROBERTS

Caroline Regis at Excel Systems
It was Friday, June 13, 2014, and it felt like an unlucky day for Caroline Regis. As she turned off the lights in her office and headed to the company’s parking lot, she wondered if this was her final day at
Excel Systems. Regis, vice president of manufacturing, was embroiled in a controversy with some of her colleagues and superiors at Excel Systems, which had recently acquired a rival company, Gemini
Systems. Gemini’s CEO, Roger Dreanan, had become CEO at Excel. Dreanan wanted Excel to adopt
Gemini’s approach of outsourcing manufacturing because Gemini’s vice president for supply chain management, Margaret Ogilvie, had used this model to good effect there.
Regis thought, “How could my area of responsibility just disappear, evaporate? Basically, they want to eliminate manufacturing as a function and completely outsource all our production. We’ve built out our manufacturing capability over the past few years, and we add a lot of value with this function: shorter shipping times to customers, better integration with engineering. It is just crazy.”
Regis decided she needed to confront Steve Spanner, COO at Excel. She said to herself, “Either they will let me do my job or I should just leave.”

Background: Excel Industries
Ron Whitney was a high-profile serial entrepreneur who founded a web company that he had sold for several million dollars in 2007. He then focused on what he saw as the “next-generation melding of web and hardware.” He founded Excel in 2010 and then received several rounds of venture funding from some of the premier VC firms on the East Coast. The company’s board included several highprofile venture capitalists. Whitney built Excel on the idea that custom hardware could track certain dimensions of individual behavior, automatically upload these data to

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