Starting about 20 years ago, with our 6th edition, Jay and I began developing a series of company video and cases. They have ranged from manufacturers of potato chips, boats, and ambulances, to service firms like a hospital, an NBA team, Red Lobster, and Hard Rock. The videos are brief (5 – 12 minutes) and tie directly to the content of a specific text chapter. There may be as many as seven videos on one company (such as Arnold Palmer Hospital or Hard Rock Café) and students seem to like following one or two organizations throughout the text/semester. We are very pleased, that over the years, our 35 videos have won many awards, including 2 Silver Addy’s for the best short video, selected from 10,000’s of entries each year. We are even up for an Emmy award for one of our Orlando Magic videos!
I have always started the first week of the semester with one or both of the following: Hard Rock Café: OM in Services (8 minutes) and Frito-Lay: OM in Manufacturing (7 minutes). The first shows how a service firm that is known throughout the world approaches some of the 10 OM decisions around which we structure the text. This firm is especially interesting because it is a lot more than a restaurant. We show that Hard Rock makes almost the same revenue from its small retail shops as it does from the food side of the house.
The second video provides a perfect contrast to Hard Rock and makes for a great class discussion on how manufacturers
differ from service firms. Frito-Lay is also a product everyone knows. But this company does not let outsiders in to tour, and has proprietary processes that even we were not allowed to film. This video reviews how Frito-Lay deals with all 10 of the decisions that OM managers have to make.
I hope our video series helps get your Fall, 2015 semester off to a successful start. And there is more to come, as we introduce five new videos featuring OM at Alaska Airlines in January, 2016!