Mona El Fadly

This case examines a business in the food catering industry and demonstrates the importance of supply chain practices even to an entrepreneur’s small business. The business is legally registered as ‘El Yosr Food Corner’ and has been operating in Egypt since 1997. It provides standardized as well as customized home-made oriental dishes at competitive prices. By 2009, the surge in the growth of the business had strained the company’s operational capabilities in various ways. Furthermore, the business had encountered a number of hitches as a result of inefficiencies in supply chain management. Menna Reda, El Yosr’s consultant, was called in to advise the enterprise owner and managing director, Mona El Fadly, of the proper course of action to address these challenges.

Honda Power Products

The International Commercial and Industrial Investment Company, S.A.E (ICII) is a trading company specialized in high-end power products and construction equipment. Honda power products accounts for almost 25% percent of the company’s sales. Since the introduction of Chinese products into the Egyptian market, Honda sales have been increasing, however at a decreasing rate. ICII is facing a number of challenges related to Honda’s decreasing market share. The main challenges are configuring a marketing strategy to ensure its viability in a turbulent market and selecting growth alternative that ensures its sustainability in light of the changing market conditions.

Social Marketing in Egypt

The following case focuses on the concept of social marketing in Egypt and how it is applied at the charity and development-focused non-governmental organization (NGO) Nahdet El Mahrousa (NM). This is one of the recently established NGOs; it has initiated a creative model, whereby individuals and institutions are encouraged to seek their support in starting a local developmental initiative. One of the projects that NM is proud to support is the “Young Innovators Awards” (YIA) program, which was launched in 2004. It could be considered one of the success stories of social marketing. However, after several successful years, the program turned into a dilemma for its managing team, when its main source of funding was not available anymore. They were faced with the challenge of finding alternative sources of financial support in a limited amount of time to evade the drawbacks of stopping the program all together.

Premium International for Credit Services

The case follows through the history of PICS, presenting the business model and the market for its products. It then moves on to outline the financial position of PICS over the period 2002-2005,which shows that, despite double-digit growth in revenue, the company has suffered from poor bottom lines that have put the company in severe financial distress.

Implementing Business Intelligence in the Dynamic Beverages Sales and Distribution Environment

To compete successfully in today’s retail business arena, senior management are often demanding fast and responsive Information Systems that enable the company not only to manage its operations but to provide on-the-fly performance measurement through a variety of tools. Use of (ERP) systems have been slow in responding to these needs, despite the wealth of the internally generated business databases and reports as a consequence of functional integration. The specific nature and demands by those senior management staff require the congregation of many external data elements and use data mining techniques to provide fast discovery of performance slippages or changes in the business environment. Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (BI) applications, evolved during the past few decades, have been implemented to respond to these needs. In this case write-up, we present how the ERP system was utilized as the backbone for use by BI tools and systems to provide Sales and Marketing units in a transnational company subsidiary in Egypt to actively respond to the demands for agile information services. The Egypt subsidiary is the HQ of the African region’s operations of several franchises and distributers of the company products, in addition to operating a beverage concentrate manufacturing plant in Egypt, which services the entire region’s beverage products needs.

Accounting and Auditing of Financial Derivatives

The Egyptian Capital Market Authority (CMA) examined the company’s financial statements for the year ended on December 31, 2008, while the auditors’ reports forced the company’s management, despite the objection of two of the company’s auditors, to restate its financial statements at December 31, 2008, and modify its profit appropriation statement after their publication to shareholders and the public. The research presents the problems related to the application of the International Accounting Standards no 32 and 38 “Financial assets and Derivatives,” their Egyptian equivalents, and the Egyptian Standards on auditing no 700 and 702. Further, the research identifies the differences associated with auditors issuing contradictory audit reports for a company’s single set of financial statements.

Ariel Egypt

This case study examines the past and present challenges facing Ariel, a long-time market leader in the detergent sector in Egypt whose market share has started to slip. In particular, it examines the marketing strategies and performance of Ariel High Suds, which is witnessing a declining market share as well as a decline in the overall high-suds market due to fierce competition and the growing low-suds market in Egypt.

Path to Success

The current case examines the management strategies of a leading furniture company that started off as a small business and rapidly expanded globally. The success the company has achieved through its innovative marketing strategies and use of international management techniques is presented. The case highlights the company’s flexibility in adapting its organizational structures to the nature of the market in different countries, and its reliance on a cross-cultural management approach to marketing in order to increase product acceptance by consumers across the world.

A Comparative Analysis of Activity-Based Costing and Traditional Costing Systems

Today, organizational environments are increasingly characterized by an expanding use of advanced technologies. A company’s management accounting system should capture the underlying technology, be consistent with corporate commitment to total quality and increased automation, and promote its efforts to compete on the basis of cost, quality, and lead time. However, the recent literature reveals that traditional cost accounting systems systematically introduce serious product cost distortions, which lead to inappropriate strategic decisions. Activity-Based Costing (ABC) represents an alternative paradigm that is giving more accurate and traceable cost information. The objective of this case is to illustrate the application of ABC method in a single manufacturing organization operating in the metal industry and to compare the results of ABC with volume based costing (traditional costing) method. The results of the application highlight the weak points of volume based costing which assigns factory overhead costs using direct labor-hours or machine-hours as a cost driver. As a result, volume-based costing under-costs low-volume product (i.e. products requiring fewer direct labor hours in total), while it over-costs high-volume products (i.e. products requiring more direct labor-hours in total), and thus, a product is subsidized at the expense of others. In cost accounting this is called cross-subsidization. However, activity-based costing traces overhead consumption by each product and thus provides a more accurate per-unit overhead cost.

KOHLER®

A newly appointed Middle East regional marketing manager for a major sanitary ware producer is exploring options to improve sales forecasts. The old forecasting method, which was based on historical sales from distributors’ retail stores, performed very poorly. Regional sales were driven mainly by large construction projects in the Gulf countries. A new approach that explicitly considers the status of each project and the stock-keeping units (SKUs) demanded shows promise.