1. Your answers should reflect the work of a graduate student. You should thoroughly respond to each question, demonstrating the knowledge you have gained throughout the course. Responses should maintain a professional tone, contain appropriate use of business vocabulary, and avoid grammatical or spelling errors.
2. Appropriate use of paragraphs for clarity within each answer is recommended.
3. Answers to each case must have AT LEAST 2 credible outside sources. The articles supplied in your exam are the cases themselves and will not count as one of your sources. Credible sources can be found in trusted journals or periodicals such as Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes, etc. (NOT Wikipedia, blogs, etc.).
4. Research should be used to support your points, but the majority of your response should be made up of your own knowledge and analysis, not cited material.
5. Quoting or paraphrasing material from other sources (websites, books, articles, essays, journals, etc.) without properly referencing them is considered plagiarism. Deriving or obtaining material from any paid services is also considered plagiarism. Information directly quoted must be noted with quotation marks (or indented if five or more lines). All sources must be cited, whether they are paraphrased, used in part, or directly quoted.
6. There must be a bibliography at the end of EACH case (on a separate page following the response to the case) specifying references used for THAT case.
Formatting
1. Responses to each case should be neatly presented: typed, double-spaced, 12-point font size, with standard Microsoft Word margins.
2. Answers to each question should be presented separately. You may copy and paste each individually numbered question and write your answer beneath each question. A typical case response that includes the written questions, thorough answers, and a bibliography would be several pages long.
3. All sources should be cited using Chicago style. References to sources should be made using footnotes, and the bibliography page for each case should follow Chicago style rules. For more information, please use https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/01/ and the Chicago example provided with the Exam as resources.
Case 2 Strategic Management
When Smart Technology Meets Old Machinery
1. Strategic Management has taken on a new dimension as it has become interwoven with technology. Explain how you conceptualize the emerging relationship between strategy and technology.
2. Are strategy and technology independent or interdependent? Explain.
3. What changes do you foresee in business strategy as technology evolves in such a manner that it becomes both a part of corporate culture and consumer life?
When Smart Technology Meets Old Machinery
Mary Catherine O’Connor. The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2016.
New and old: A vibration sensor helps monitor a milling machine in a GE plant and transmits information wirelessly. PHOTO: GENERAL ELECTRIC
It’s a tantalizing vision: Bright and shiny factories where robotic arms and conveyors never break down and production goals are never missed—all thanks to internet-connected sensors that monitor machine health and respond to the slightest supply or logistics hiccup. But for the vast majority of factories today, the reality could hardly be more different. They’re still running on decades-old machinery that isn’t outfitted with sensors.
Getting from where we are now to the factory of the future can be done—has been done—but it isn’t as easy as strapping the industrial equivalent of a Fitbit onto each piece of old equipment in a plant and calling it a day. It’s costly. There are no ready-made solutions—each case is different. And it requires a deep understanding of each machine’s functions and the metrics to be tracked; trial and error to determine the right sensor to use and the best place to put it; and a plan for collecting, filtering and making sense of the collected data. “Many shop floors are covered in machines from 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago,” says Isaac Brown, an analyst at Lux Research. “Plugging them into the internet is totally not trivial—it’s not like plugging in a PC.” It’s complicated.
It’s an exercise that’s familiar to Mike Fisher, general manager of Harley-Davidson HOG -4.46 % ’s York, Pa., manufacturing plant. In 2010, the plant began a massive restructuring and deployed a software system that collects data from manufacturing equipment to look for early signs of mechanical problems. Hundreds of machines were retrofitted with sensors. Replacing them with new machinery that had sensors and connectivity built in wasn’t considered an option, because much of the existing equipment, at around 10 years old, has decades of production left in it. The reason manufacturers go to all this trouble is that installing sensors on equipment and connecting them to computer networks—what some call the Industrial Internet of Things—can enable plant managers to track such metrics as temperature and vibration to keep their machinery operating at peak efficiency, and alert managers to problems that could slow production or, worse, shut down a line or an entire plant. The data from the machines also powers analytics systems that can predict problems long before they’re likely to occur.
Sensors “make the equipment more complicated, and they are themselves complicated,” says Mr. Fisher. “But with the complexity comes opportunity.” The difficulties start with choosing which sensors to install. “Making sure you have the right ones can be difficult,” Mr. Fisher says, because sensors aren’t made with the particulars of each machine in mind. Often plant managers can’t tell which sensor will most accurately collect the data they want from a machine without a series of test runs—a time-consuming process. Installing the sensors is another challenge. Ensuring that they are placed on or integrated into the equipment so that they collect the intended data—not vibrations from an adjacent machine, or heat being generated around rather than inside a motor—requires calibration work by experienced engineers.
General Electric Co. GE -2.92 % faced those challenges at its power and water plant in Schenectady, N.Y. To monitor the power usage of a massive milling machine, GE attached vibration sensors to the machine’s pumps and mounted a current transducer to its control box, to track voltage. Out of the gate, the system failed to definitively detect when the machine was actively milling, says Shaopeng Liu, a cyber-physical systems engineer at GE Global Research. But after some tweaks, the right data was teased out of the behemoth, allowing it to be run more efficiently. Even when everything is up and running, though, a plant manager’s worries aren’t necessarily over. “They fail sometimes,” Mr. Fisher says of the sensors.
Despite all that, the overhaul at the Harley-Davidson plant was a success. Accelerometers now send data to a vibration-analysis program that can help forecast mechanical glitches. Thermographic cameras alert operators when a machine is running hot. Ultrasound sensors look for air leaks. Sensors track the temperature and humidity of paint as it is applied to motorcycle components, as well as the speed at which it flows, to prevent clogs or other failures. The system has allowed Harley-Davidson to do away with much of the redundant equipment it used to keep on hand in case any of its machines conked out. “In fact,” Mr. Fisher says, “the machines are lasting longer than the electronic components that control them,” because of the plant’s sensor-based predictive maintenance program.
Wireless or wired?
Cost, of course, is always a consideration. Chris LeBeau, global IT director for systems integrator Advanced Technology Services Inc., says sensor prices vary widely, from $150 to $500, depending on ruggedness, the sensor technology, processing capabilities and connectivity options. As many as 40 sensors might be added to a single, vital piece of machinery, and when the labor and engineering costs of planning, testing and executing the retrofit are included, costs could hit $100,000 for one machine.
Plant managers can choose wireless sensors or ones that are hard-wired into their machinery. A number of factors are at play in that choice, including cost considerations. Even though costs recently have plummeted for wireless sensors, they generally are still more expensive than wired sensors. And wireless connections aren’t always reliable enough, especially when continuous immediate data collection is critical to keeping a plant humming—even a brief loss of connectivity can cause problems. Plus, many plants don’t have Wi-Fi networks, and adding one in a large facility can be a big expense, says Mr. LeBeau. “It can be a $250,000 investment for Wi-Fi coverage,” he says.
It often makes more sense to hard-wire sensors into equipment, says Sundeep Oberoi, global head of niche technology delivery for Tata Consultancy Services. Cost is one reason. Also, with wired sensors plant managers don’t have to worry about delays in data collection because of connectivity issues, or about the potential failure of the radios that transmit the data collected by wireless sensors, he says. But costs can climb for wired sensors when machines require an auxiliary port to accommodate them, he adds.
Case 3 Management Information Systems
Shopping Malls Are Tracking Your Every Move
1. What’s your perspective on the tracking of customers’ buying habits by the shopping malls?
2. Discuss the invasion of privacy and the potential for future abuse as individual data is gathered, analyzed, and commercially used. Substantiate your answer with real world examples.
Shopping Malls Are Tracking Your Every Move
Mall owners are eager to remain relevant in the era of internet shopping
Esther Fung. The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2017.
A woman uses her smartphone to check prices in Miami’s Dolphin Mall. PHOTO: J PAT CARTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Add another category to the growing list of companies monitoring their customers: shopping-mall landlords.
As more shoppers tote smartphones while browsing in stores, shopping-center owners are tracking their movements and spending habits to try to figure out how best to arrange stores and mall layouts to boost shopping activity.
Some landlords measure how long people stay in the mall, how long they linger in particular stores or displays, and where they were before and after heading to the mall. That gives them a better idea of which stores benefit from being in proximity to one another.
Landlords also match shoppers’ location data against their social media or email accounts and channel personalized advertisements to them.
The moves reflect mall owners’ eagerness to remain relevant in the era of internet shopping. A wave of store closures by big department-store chains and other retailers has left malls around the U.S. with empty space and a sense of urgency over how best to fill it. Some investors are betting against the shares of operators of weaker malls, increasing the pressure.
Personalized shopping experiences are becoming a focus for customers, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group. In its survey of 1022 adults in February, 39% of the respondents said they would visit a mall or shopping center more often if they received alerts from stores that are selling products they are interested in purchasing.
The patterns that emerge from the new smartphone monitoring techniques can be useful. Some customers, for example, are big spenders who drop more than $20,000 a year during a few trips to a mall, while others might visit 50 times a year but barely spend, said Ivan Frank, vice president of marketing at Taubman Centers Inc.,one of the nation’s largest mall owners.
“There is no one silver bullet” to reach all of them, said Mr. Frank.
Known for its high-end properties such as the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey and the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, Taubman has been engaging various technology vendors to improve its marketing strategy.
One vendor Taubman uses is StepsAway, a cloud-based platform that delivers store discounts and promotions to smartphones that sync with each malls’ Wi-Fi network. Shoppers aren’t required to download an app and are able to view offers by store or by category, such as women, men, children or shoes.
To use a shopping center’s Wi-Fi or app, customers typically have to agree to terms and conditions that disclose its privacy policy before they can log in.
Mobile games also are starting to appeal to landlords looking for other ways to deliver incentives directly to shoppers.
Some landlords include a screen at a corner of the food court and designate that area as a place where customers can compete with each other at games played on their phones, with the images projected on the screen.
“People have to provide basic information to play, such as their age, email address, and you’ve instantly captured these customers,” said Steve Ridley, chief executive officer of FunWall, a social and tournament gaming company. The data help the mall’s marketing team improve loyalty programs, including promotions such as gift certificates or free drinks.
In The Shops at South Town in Utah, owner Pacific Retail Capital Partners invested millions to renovate the shopping center to add beacons, which emit signals to smartphones or tablets in the vicinity, and multimedia wall displays that include digital art and advertising.
The Los Angeles-based real-estate developer also included a 13-by-6-foot interactive wall in the dining terrace where children can play a custom-developed emoji game that draws families and increases their mall time.
Najla Kayyem, senior vice president of marketing for Pacific Retail Capital Partners, brushed off concerns that people might come to the shopping center to game rather than to shop. “There is a direct correlation between the amount of time and the amount of money spent,” she said.
Some malls have been using beacons not only to offer personalized coupons to the shopper’s smartphone but also to get data on how often shoppers pass by the store and how often they use their phones to make calls or pay for purchases.
“It’s not enough to pay for advertising, you’ve got to own your own customer data,” said Jencey Keeton, director of corporate marketing at Trademark Property Company, a shopping-center developer based in Fort Worth, Texas.
Still, while the information gleaned from mobile technology is promising, landlords are trying to figure how to harness it better.
“You can find an oil well, but you still have to refine the oil before it is usable,” said Taubman’s Mr. Frank.