Background
At Lagos Business School, one of the methods of teaching is through case studies. Case studies present real-world examples/problems for which the students are meant to analyze and form solutions. The case studies were given ahead of time for the students to analyze and answer questions about them before they were reviewed in class. The MBA manager was gracious enough to inform us ahead of time about how rigorous the MBA was going to become for us. He also pointed out that one of the most time-consuming aspects of it was the case-study analyses, which typically take 2 – 3 hours per case (if you want to do a thorough job).
The Case Study
This week I dived into my first case study which was a part of the Analysis of Business Problems course. This particular case study was about a company called ECSA. ECSA was a manufacturing company based in Zaragoza, Spain. The company manufactured a wide variety of metal and composite parts for aerospace (air crafts and satellites), automobile, public lighting, and farm machinery industries. They had 3 plants spread across the Aragon region of Spain.
The Problem
The company recently won a contract to produce wind turbine blades for another company, but they realized that they would not be able to do it in any of their existing facilities and they would not be able to rent a plant from a different company. They were left with two options:
- To locate the manufacturing plant in a small town, orTo locate the manufacturing plant in a part of the city close to their main plant. How I approached the Case Study
I dived into the analysis with some bias towards siting the plant near the main plant in the city. This bias stemmed from the assumption that small towns typically do not have the infrastructural advantages that most big cities have, such as access to major roads, rail, and other transportation systems that are necessary for transporting wind turbine parts, which are typically massive in size. But this small town in consideration was different, apart from the required number of skilled workforce, it has every other thing.Digging deeper into the analysis, it started to look like the small town has better advantages over the bigger town. After I ran my financial analysis, it looked like locating the plant in the small town would be more advantageous than the city.
What My Group did
Later in the day, I worked on the case study with my class group. The group discussion was very interesting and illuminating. My group members presented varying viewpoints and approaches concerning the case study. From the discussions, I learned two things: to stay within the given parameters in the case study and to use the structured approach to problem-solving, which we were taught in the previous class, in my analysis and review. This meant that I had to go back and restructure my work using the structures approach.
What I did next
Using the insights that I had gained from our group discussions, I went back to my notes and redid the case study analysis, using the structured format, while trying as much as possible to keep everything within the limits of the given parameters.
The outcome
When we analyzed the case study, we had no idea that the faculty would call on us group by group to present our work. When this turned out to be the case this week, my group adopted my work since it was in a good format for it to be presented, and it also captured most of the conversation we had as a group in our meeting. After I presented our analysis, many people came for us because our proposal was different from what the other groups presented, and this led to heated discussions in the class.
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