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8.9 Case Examples
One of the most important uses of repositories like the Process Handbook is to help people organize and share examples of innovative or otherwise interesting business case examples. For instance, these repositories can include ''best practices,''''typical practices,''and even instructive examples of ''bad practices.''They can include cases for benchmarking, for business school classes, and for consulting firm practice development. Organizing case examples in this way can help you find relevant examples more easily than with, for example, keyword searches, and it can help you easily find and compare examples that have deep similarities, even if the words used to describe the cases are very different.To illustrate these possibilities, the Process Handbook already includes hundreds of case examples of business activities in specific companies. These case examples were developed by students, faculty, and staff at the MIT Sloan School of Management; students at the London Business School; and staff at Phios Corporation. In most cases these examples were based on previously published descriptions from business journals, magazines, and newspapers. In a few cases the examples were based on original field research in the companies described.Most of the case examples currently included in the Process Handbook fall into one of three main categories:Supply chain examples. The Process Handbook currently includes over 100 case examples of interesting or innovative supply chain practices. For instance, it includes examples like Cisco's use of their corporate intranet for electronic purchasing and Toyota's use of narrowing sets of design possibilities to enhance concurrent engineering.
Hiring examples. As part of our project to develop innovative ideas for hiring (described in chapters 1, 12, and 13), we added a number of case examples of hiring practices used in different companies. For example, the Process Handbook includes descriptions of Cisco's use of focus groups of current employees to help target on-line recruiting ads, and Marriott's use of automated telephone screening of job candidates. There are approximately 50 of these case examples.
Innovative eBusiness examples. During the peak of the eBusiness boom, we entered over 400 case examples of innovative uses of eBusiness concepts. These examples include all 70 finalists in the MIT eBusiness Awards program for two years, as well as a number of other examples from other sources. For instance, the Process Handbook includes descriptions of Amazon.com's electronic book distribution and eBay's electronic auctions. To illustrate what these examples look like, an excerpt of the Amazon.com example is shown in figure 8.12.
Figure 8.12: Sample case example describing the way Amazon.com distributes books via the Internet
These eBusiness examples are all organized into the business model categories above (Creator, Distributor, etc.) and thus provide some interesting comparisons across industries. For example, this organization puts Mattel and Dell close together as Creators that allow their end customers to configure their products, even though Barbie dolls and computers are in very different industries.
8.9.1 Updating the Database of Case Examples
We believe that most of the current content of the Process Handbook (e.g., the generic business activity models and the classification structure) has enduring value over long periods of time. It is unlikely, for example, that significant new forms of business will be invented that do not involve some form of buying and selling.But other parts of the Process Handbook, especially the case examples, have much shorter ''half-lives''of usefulness. A number of the companies whose eBusiness case examples we entered a few years ago, for instance, have already gone out of business. In some of these companies there is still value in seeing the basic ideas and, perhaps, the lessons to be learned from their failures. But the value of a topical database of case examples depends critically on it being continually updated.
