Oscar Mayer Case Study

Oscar Mayer Questions

1. Focus on questions 4 and 5 given at the end of the case text. Be familiar with Exhibit 1 (several pages), and if you load up anything in a spreadsheet, load up Exhibit 2

2. Study the financial proposals on p. 8 carefully. Create a new column, which reflects your recommendations. It is imperative in this case to be explicit about the financial implications of your recommendation.

• Case presenters: plan on putting the new version of the table on p.8 up on screen with your recommendation highlighted. You can accept all the input from his managers, or you can adjust one or more to get a different summary result

3. The key thing to remember is that investment resources are limited and a choice to emphasize one area is automatically a choice to de-emphasize some other area. Don’t try to evade this issue. Make your choices and be prepared to defend them.

Xerox 1 questions

[read only through p. 13 and exhibit 5 for this first part of Xerox; ignore the guarantee material]

[Be sure to read the Best Chapter 1 pages, particularly if you are presenting]

1. They are doing four satisfaction surveys now (pp. 10-11). If budgets get tight, which one is the most important to keep, and which could be dropped?

• Case presenters: this is your key recommendation

2. They give an example questionnaire in Exhibit 4: critique it.

3. They have settled on a sample size of 10,000 for the Periodic survey. Is that the right size, or too big, or too small? What calculation needs to be performed to answer this question?

4. Do you think companies like Xerox still do satisfaction surveys today? What’s the same, and what’s different now, do you suppose?

• Please try to go beyond ‘they would use a web survey tool today’

Note: this case is about customer data, not financial data. There is no income statement to analyze.