Home Depot Case Study

Home Depot Case Study

The Home Depot case study examines Home Depot’s disaster recovery plans and the past successes and failures of the program. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida and left 75,000 homes either completely destroyed or badly damaged. After the hurricane, Home Depot struggled to keep inventory of building materials for customers who needed to repair their homes and businesses. This was because Home Depot has a large concentration of stores in Florida. More than 10% of its stores are located in Florida. As shown in the SWOT analysis in the appendix, this is a weakness for home depot, as hurricanes are a rather common event in Florida. Hurricane Andrew destroyed one brand new store which had opened four days before, caused three other stores to close, and forced 150 employees from their homes. It was after this that Home Depot began training customers in the area on hurricane preparedness through “Hurricane Expos” at the beginning of the hurricane season.

Then, in 2000, Home Depot hired Paul Raines as Operations Vice President for all the stores in Florida. Raines had a great deal of experience working in Latin America. In early 2005 The Home Depot reorganized its divisions to North, South, and West, and promoted Rains to the divisional leader for the southern region. This was party to consolidate all hurricane activity to one team to strengthen communication and expertise and to develop a clear line of command, which, as referenced in the SWOT analysis in the appendix, is one of Home Depot’s strengths.

In 2004, Florida experienced one of the worst hurricane seasons in history. Hurricanes Charlie, Jean, Frances, and Ivan all hit Florida within a span of three or four months. In response to this, Raines developed four lessons learned from the disaster on how to better prepare in the future. The first lesson is the need for speed. Home Depot recognized that time is of the essence in the event of natural disasters and repairs must be made...