Heartsong LLC Heartsong LLC is a designer and manufacturer of replacement heart valves based in Peoria, Illinois. While a relatively small company in the medical devices field, it has established a worldwide reputation as the provider of choice high-quality, leading-edge artificial heart valves. Most of its products are sold to large regional hospital systems and research hospitals. Specialty heart centers are another emerging, but fast-growing, market for its valves. While Heartsong would like to grow quickly, its growth is constrained by the need to finance larger production runs and then carry this additional inventory. For products like those of Heartsong, vendors typically do not collect payment until the unit is actually used in surgery. Moreover, heart valves are usually required on short notice which means that they must be either onsite, or inventoried at a nearby location. If nearby, then transport of the unit to a hospital or heart center occurs within a matter of hours, and sometimes minutes. For this reason, accelerated growth would require Heartsong to both finance increased production of its heart valves, along with carrying increased levels of inventory that are in fact sitting on their customers' shelves. In fact, inventory-carrying cost is its single largest cost outside of research and development. While profitable growth is necessary if Heartsong is to continue extending its competitive advantage through increasingly greater investments in basic heart valve R&D, it is not clear that the company can internally support all these increased financial commitments (R&D, manufacturing, and inventory). Doc Watson, the CEO of Heartsong, is considering an outside contractor, EdFex, to handle the inventorying, warehousing, and delivery of its valves. EdFex has secure, high-tech warehouses in most major population centers around the country, and can ensure delivery of a product to these markets from its warehouses in less than one hour. QUESTION TO ANSWER 1. Identify the value-chain activities that appear to underlie Heartsong's competitive advantage? 2. Why might an outsourcing arrangement with EdFex be attractive to Heartsong? 3. What are the implications of an EdFex outsourcing arrangement for the capabilities underlying Heartsong's competitive advantage?

CASE STUDY 1 You are the CEO of Fair Child Enterprises SAOG. The organization deals in manufacturing product range for just born kids.  You have your functional managers to you. They monitor Financial, Production, Marketing, Human Resources, and Information Technology functions.  Every functional area is supported by workers to perform day-to-day activities.  CEO of this organization has the ability to oversee the entire picture of the organization with the support of the functional managers perform the functions of management. Production manager of this organization has specialized knowledge and expertise in operating specific equipment. The skills required to function effectively in this organization are: Conceptual, Technical and Human skills.   Answer the following questions based on CASE STUDY   Which of the following functional area takes care of staffing of personnel in the organization? a. Production function b. Administration function c. Human resources management…

“To cut the number of projects, the steering committee used a weighting scheme that reflected theairline’s priorities, which were: fly safe, generate revenue, reduce costs, and customer service. Theweighting scheme easily weeded out the fluff.”Use a weighted scoring model to help the committee choose between two projects: Booking SystemUpgrade and Cabin Crew Retraining. The relative weights for each criterion and the assessment ofeach project for these criteria are shown in the following table. Which project would you choose andwhy?Criteria                       Weight  Booking System Upgrade Pilot Crew RetrainingFly safe                       40        4                                           10Generate revenue       30        9                                             9Reduce costs              20        7                                             8Customer service        10       10                                            10 (Assume 10 represents the preferred score and 1…

Assignment: Case Study Mary is the associate director of a nonprofit agency that provides assistance to children and families. She is the head of a department that focuses on evaluating the skill-building programs the agency provides to families. She reports directly to the agency leadership. As a whole, the agency has been cautious in hiring this year because of increased competition for federal grant funding. However, they have also suffered high staff turnover. Two directors, three key research staff, and one staff person from the finance department have left.   Mary has a demanding schedule that requires frequent travel; however, she supervises two managers who in turn are responsible for five staff members each. Both managers have been appointed within the last six months.   Manager 1: Kelly has a specific background in research. She manages staff who provide research support to another department that delivers behavioral health services to youth. Kelly supports her staff and is…