Domain 04 · 24 cases
Operations & Scaling
Supply chains, throughput, standardization and the unglamorous capabilities that compound, from Toyota and Amazon to Zara, FedEx and the Mumbai dabbawalas.
- Find the operational capability worth years of investment
- Decide what to standardize and where quality breaks first
- Tell when to automate and when complexity makes you fragile
Amazon: Fulfillment and Robotics at Scale
When Amazon promised two-day Prime delivery, most retailers shrugged. A decade later, shoppers expect same-day on countless items, and matching that took…
Apple: Tim Cook and the Supply Chain Machine
When Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook in 1998, Apple had months of inventory rotting in warehouses. Cook called inventory "fundamentally evil" and, within a year,…
Boeing 737 MAX: When Cost Pressure Overrides Safety Culture
Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, and the investigations found no single smoking-gun engineering failure. Facing the Airbus…
Chipotle: Food Safety and the Supply Chain
Chipotle built one of the strongest brands in fast casual on fresh ingredients and a 'food with integrity' promise. Then, in 2015 and 2016, E. coli,…
Disney Parks: Engineering the Guest Experience
Disney parks are famous for magic, but step behind the castle and you find one of the most disciplined operations machines ever built. Hidden trash…
Domino's: The Turnaround Built on Honesty
Around 2009, Domino's did something brands almost never do: it ran ads telling the world its own pizza was bad. Internal research was brutal. Customers…
FedEx: The Hub-and-Spoke Model
To ship a package from Memphis to Nashville, FedEx flew it to Memphis first. The routing looks absurd, and Fred Smith reportedly got a mediocre grade when he…
Ford and the Moving Assembly Line
In 1913, Ford's Highland Park plant introduced the moving assembly line. Within a year the time to build a Model T collapsed from roughly twelve hours to…
IKEA: Designing Cost Out from the Start
IKEA sells furniture at prices most rivals simply cannot touch, and the easy assumption is that the secret is brutal supplier squeezing or razor-thin…
In-N-Out: The Limited-Menu Throughput Model
In-N-Out has roughly four things on its menu: burgers, fries, drinks, shakes. No chicken sandwiches, no breakfast, no seasonal specials, and almost no change…
McDonald's: The Speedee System and Franchising
In 1948, two brothers shut down their San Bernardino drive-in and rebuilt it from scratch like an engineer laying out a factory floor: a shrunk menu,…
Ocado: Warehouse Automation Done Right
Webvan raised nearly a billion dollars to automate grocery delivery, built enormous fulfillment centers across multiple cities, and was bankrupt by 2001.…
Rolls-Royce: Power by the Hour
Rolls-Royce builds jet engines, but for many airline customers it doesn't really sell the engine — it sells the hours the engine actually flies. Branded…
Ryanair: The Ultra-Low-Cost Operating Model
Ryanair charges you for a carry-on, for picking a seat, in some cases even for printing a boarding pass — and it's Europe's largest airline by passengers.…
Starbucks: The 2008 Operational Reset
By 2007, Starbucks had opened so many stores that the coffee no longer tasted like Starbucks. Comparable sales were sliding, a recession was bearing down,…
Tesla: Production Hell and Scaling
Tesla had a car the world was lining up to buy, hundreds of thousands of Model 3 reservations and a target of 5,000 vehicles a week. Then it had to actually…
The 2021 Supply Chain Crunch: When Just-in-Time Broke
For decades, just-in-time manufacturing was the gospel of operational excellence, pioneered by Toyota and copied across automotive, electronics, and consumer…
The Mumbai Dabbawalas: Six Sigma by Hand
Every morning, about 5,000 dabbawalas in Mumbai collect home-cooked lunches from households, move them across a sprawling city by train and bicycle, deliver…
The Shipping Container: Malcolm McLean and Globalization
Before the 1950s, loading a single ship took days and a small army of longshoremen hauling crates, barrels, and bales one at a time. Then a trucking…
Toyota Production System
After World War II, Toyota's Taiichi Ohno faced a constraint that should have crippled him: he could not afford to stockpile inventory the way cash-rich…
TSMC: Manufacturing as Strategy
Most technology companies treat manufacturing as a cost center to outsource and forget. In 1987, Morris Chang founded TSMC in Taiwan on a model that did not…
UPS: Routing Optimization and ORION
UPS runs one of the most complex delivery networks on earth: roughly 100,000 vehicles, millions of packages a day, routes that shift by the hour. For decades…
Walmart: Logistics as Competitive Advantage
Walmart's low prices look like a retail strategy. They're actually a logistics strategy, and the part of it that mattered most was the part customers never…
Zara: The Responsive Supply Chain
Most fashion retailers forecast trends six to nine months out and pray they guessed right. Zara, the engine inside Inditex, built a system to read demand as…
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