Essay on Harvard Case Study - Sealed Air Corporation

We evaluated our company’s position in the industry, and found ourselves in an excellent starting position to further develop our products and match them to the industry’s needs. Our market share is adequate and we can advance further with our strategy improve and reposition our products in the coming years. We have underutilized capacity, which we intend to improve, while increasing automation to reduce costs. We have plans to improve our promotion to improve product awareness and with the appropriate product lines we will increase price to improve margins and better align our high-end product image. Our current financial position is optimistic, showing our leverage (Assets/Equity) at 2.0, when our goal is to maintain 1.5-2.0 overall. By utilizing the analysis tools we are learning what elements are driving demand, how to effectively tailor our products through R&D, how best to adjust our marketing and pricing, while lowering input costs, in order to improve margins and to ensure our stakeholders are all satisfied.

1) if you were on the Dynacorp task force, what would be your first choice for an alternative design? what would be your second choice? 2) Which of the problems of the current design would your chosen design address? what problems (if any) would it not address? Are there any new problems to which it might lead? 3) What linking and alignment mechanisms would you propose to make the “grouping” of your first choice design more effective?

As a member of management Clive Jenkins is responsible for boosting employee morale to ensure that company goals are met

Similarly, buyers in the Performance and High End segments feel that performance and size are also important but the product’s reliability is most important to them. We chose to operate in these growing markets because neither segment is price sensitive and they are more concerned with overall quality and innovation which is our company’s underlying focus. Our objectives will be achieved by relying heavily on our sales and promotions team as well as increasing our spending in research and development to ensure the best, most up-to-date products for our customers. Brand awareness and accessibility is vital to our company because we are now competing against four other competitors in the same industry and customers need to be able to quickly recognize our brand of sensors.

It is critical for Sealed Air to introduce uncoated product if desire to maintain the market leader’s position, with existing machinery and technology, it would not require extra effort to produce uncoated products but have comparable production costs to competitors. As several distributors has been demanding uncoated products from Sealed Air, it seems reasonable for the company to start producing it, it would increase loyalty from the distributors and allow Sealed Air to have a more complete range of products with affordable prices for high to low-end customers. Sealed Air has already lost some market share and showed signs of continuous decline in the market’s position, uncoated product will be a ticket back into the game, it is likely to

The QWell Air Purifier is an electronic product that has a multistage filtration system and an ultraviolet bulb for detecting bacteria and germs. The system effectively cleans the air in enclosed spaces like the rooms of the house of dust, pollen, or smoke at high or low speed, without impeding airflow of the forced-air heating and cooling systems in the home.

IgG – funtions in neutralizing, opsonation, compliment activation, antibody dependent cell-mediated cytocity, neonatal immunity, and feedback inhibition of B-cells and found in the blood.

The company believes that new initiatives are necessary to bolster unit volume and especially reorders. I believe Advanced Materials lacks coherent strategy for Nundies to effectively appraise the financial worth of product service offerings. The managers must reduce the spending on order getting costs because they cannot increase their output to the capped limit of 100,000 liners. Other issues are whether or not the distribution approach currently used by the company will help reach profitability, and whether or not the company effectively reaches the target market.

Sealed Air Corporation has been the market leader in the protective packaging market for many years. Unanticipated competitors have entered the market offering uncoated bubble packaging which has gained significant market share from Sealed Air’s AirCap® coated bubble packaging material. To regain market share and expand Sealed Air’s business, a swift strategy of introducing uncoated bubble products needs to be implemented. By leveraging their large distribution network and existing manufacturing infrastructure, Sealed Air can capture the price-sensitive customers before their competitors have time to expand.

The Andrews management team has opted to pursue the strategy of differentiator with a product life cycle focus. This strategy involves the creation of products with excellent design in terms of size and performance (on the perceptual map), and MTBF. Significant investment in awareness and accessibility, and development of proficiency in the research and development sector is also central to this business strategy. In order to compensate for these high initial investments, our product prices will be relatively high; however it is believed that our customers will be drawn to our product due to high awareness and due to the superior quality of our sensors. Our released products will need to be manipulated according to the changes in expectations of the marketplace by producing smaller and faster products, according to the expected ideal size and performance of the sensors in future years. In addition, our company must invest in other important activities such as; total quality management (TQM), marketing, and human resources (HR) in order to

Sealed Air has the technology to launch uncoated products which will maintain its leadership in the US market and reverse the decreasing tendency in the European market.

In the Harvard Business School case study of Intermountain Health Care (IHC), we learned about the efforts made by IHC to adopt a new strategy for managing health care delivery that is focused on improving care quality while simultaneously saving money. Beginning in 1986 as a series of experiments tying cost outcomes to traditional clinical trials, IHC’s approach to delivering care became known as “Clinical Integration” which “referred to both an organizational structure and a set of tools” (Bohmer, 2002). The organizational structure required a departure from the traditional administrative management model to one that “involved administrative and medical

Beside suggestions stated by the senior executives and the president of Janmar Coatings, Inc., there are three ways to deploy Janmar products (Paints and sun-dries). First, since 60% ($80 million) of Janmar’s architectural coatings products were sold in DFW area, the company should distribute more of its products to that area in order to maximize sales. Regarding the non-DFW area, the majority (90%) of that area deals with “do-it-yourself” method to paint their houses or rooms, and usually the decision effected by the price of the product. Therefore, Janmar has two options for the non-DFW area, either to cut the prices of their products, or to develop a new lower quality category that has the same brand name but cheaper than the premium category. The competition in Architectural coating segment are increasing. Companies seeking growth and a higher sales base to support increasing costs are making acquisition. Major products of paint for the architectural coatings segment include Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore, the Glidden unit of Imperial Chemicals, PPG Industries, Valspar Corporation, Grow group and Pratt & Lambert. These producers account upward for 60% of

The above formula isolates free cash flows to the firm from earnings before interest and tax (EBIT). It can be noted that FCFF are after tax (1-T) but prior to interest expense. This initial overstatement of due tax is by design; the tax deductibility of interest payments will be accounted for when incorporating the after-tax cost of debt in the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) to determine the present value of free cash flows.