Business Management 101 - Recommended Case Study Sources

Business Studies | Case Study | Teacher & Student Resource

The following case studies show all the business studies theory you need to know in practice. By studying real life business case studies, you will see how business and marketing work and therefore learn quicker.

Each of the following case studies show a different aspect to business and marketing that you can use as a revision tool for your business studies.

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CasePlace.org is an online library of reading materials, multimedia content, and teaching modules that focuses on social, environmental and ethical issues in business. CasePlace.org is a project of The Aspen Institute Center for Business Education.

Cases

This database contains abstracts and ordering information for case studies written and published by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You may search by authors name, title, keyword, etc. Most cases in this collection are distributed by Harvard Business Publishing and you will find a link to the HBP site to place your order. Please contact us for other cases.

Cases - Harvard Business for Educators

In 2005, low-cost carrier JetBlue Airways makes a move that seems antithetical to the low-cost carrier model by adding a second type of aircraft to the fleet, the Embraer 190. This decision allows the airline to service medium-sized cities and achieve higher growth rates. By 2007, in response to rising fuel costs and softening demand for air travel, President and CEO David Barger recognizes that the airline must slow its growth. Students examine the impact of the two-aircraft strategy on JetBlue's operations and consider how to make reductions in aircraft capacity across the two types of planes in the fleet.

Dell's continuing case study

You can't ask for a better case study, really. The Kodak vs Polaroid debacle, followed by Kodak vs Digital photography, perhaps? Well Dell vs everyone is a good one, anyway, although sometimes it looks like Dell vs Dell. Here's a link for you: Dell, the world's second largest PC vendor, plans to cut costs by $3 billion as it slashes the price of materials and components going into its gadgets and reduces operating expenses, including jobs, the company said Monday. "Now this does not happen overnight," said Lynn Tyson, vice president of investor relations at Dell, on the company's investor blog. "In fact we said we believe it will take three years to achieve an annualized savings of $3 billion. This means that before you adjust for growth, we believe our costs at the end of our fiscal 2011 will be $3 billion lower than at the end of fiscal 2008." Money saved from the cost reductions will be invested back into the business and used to improve profitability, Tyson said.

Now they are saying that they will cut some labour out of the business, which is a common way to cut costs. And they will cut out a PC production line - apparently they misjudged the size and timing of the switch to notebooks, although how they could do that is beyond me. Perhaps more worrying is that they plan to "seek savings in all areas, from design, manufacturing, logistics, materials, and operating expenses", and that they "may also sell or spin off...Dell Financial Services".

For a company that started out with a claimed innovative means of assembling PCs "to order" via super-cheap phone and on-line distribution, it's worrying that incremental review of operational costs is not embedded into the company ethos. After all, that's where they started. Pulling together reasonable quality components from competing suppliers in a just-in-time assembly process that met the individual needs of consumers, without the added overheads that the big players had built in. Oh dear. Maybe they became fat and lazy too?

Well if if needs to be knifed, so be it. As long as quality is maintained, at least where it is now, I mean. Any less and the compromises will peek through just a bit too clearly. But hiving off the finance arm? Is this a reflection of recent loss of focus on core competence? Or are they bleeding so badly that they need to convert assets to cash, pronto?

All very interesting to watch as this case study unfolds.