Dakota Office Products

Robert S. Kaplan

Case | HBS Case Collection | August 2001 (Revised February 2005)

Dakota Office Products

Abstract

The senior management team of Dakota, an office products distributor, is concerned about the company's first loss in history. Explores the role for activity based costing and customer profitability measurement in a distribution company. Dakota's customers are increasingly demanding more specialized services, such as desktop delivery. Also, whereas some customers have switched to electronic ordering, others continue to place their orders manually. Pricing is based on a fixed markup of the cost of the purchased item. The managers feel that the fixed markup may not be compensating them for the higher costs of manual order processing and desktop delivery. The financial manager initiates an effort to estimate the costs of handling the different types of orders so that she can estimate the profitability of individual customers based on their actual order pattern.

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Profit; Distribution; Customers; Distribution Industry;

Language: English

Format: Print

5 pages

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Citation:

Kaplan, Robert S. "Dakota Office Products." Harvard Business School Case 102-021, August 2001. (Revised February 2005.)

Kurt Meyer, chief risk officer of Swissgrid, the Swiss national electricity transmission system operator, reflects on the risk management system he installed after the deregulation and liberalization of the European energy market. With 41 connections to other European networks, a failure in Swissgrid’s network could interrupt the supply of electricity in Switzerland and much of Europe. Meyer describes the periodic interactive risk workshops conducted at each business unit to identify, assess, and mitigate risks. Executive Risk Workshops of the CEO and the company’s leadership team discuss the business units’ risk profiles and risks that cut across the units, such as safety, weather, and regulatory changes. New and emerging risks are discussed at Extraordinary Risk Workshops. Meyer recently deployed an app on employees’ smartphones for them to easily report anomalies or concerns. Reports from the app are embedded in a new real-time crisis management platform used by several Swiss companies, federal authorities, and the Swiss Army. Despite a full array of risk management tools and processes, Meyer remains concerned about risks yet to be identified.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

Reverse the Curse of the Top-5

Robert S. Kaplan

The past 40 years has seen a large increase in the number of articles submitted to journals ranked in the top-5 of their discipline. This increase is the rational response, by faculty, to the overweighting of publications in these journals by university promotions and tenure committees. The ranking factors for academic journals, however, arose for a completely different purpose, to guide the journal acquisition decisions by budget-constrained university librarians. Using journal impact factors to infer the quality of an faculty members’ publications incurs a high incidence of both Type 1 errors, when we conclude incorrectly that a paper published in a top-5 journal is a high-impact paper, and Type 2 errors, when we conclude that papers (and books) not published in top-5 journals have low impact. In addition, a third type of error gets introduced as faculty pursue the research they perceive is favored by editors of top-5 journals, at the potential expense of more innovative and relevant research, perceived to be unpublishable in a top-tier journal. Accounting scholarship, in particular, has underinvested in research about innovative practices or the emerging accounting issues faced by contemporary organizations (Kaplan, 2011), likely because such research is viewed as unpublishable in top-5 journals. This gap persists despite recent scholarship that has documented how important, fundamental ideas can emerge from “use-inspired” research (see Pasteur’s Quadrant (Stokes, 1997)). The paper concludes by suggesting reforms to overcome the dysfunctional fixation on publication in top-5 journals.

Keywords: Information Publishing; Journals and Magazines; Power and Influence; Research;

Citation:

Kaplan, Robert S. "Reverse the Curse of the Top-5." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-052, October 2018. View Details

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This note was written to provide students with fundamental concepts and methods for the analysis of cost variances. It focuses on the decomposition of cost variances into price, quantity, and mix variance components, an approach that allows students to identify the root causes of differences between expected and actual costs.

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Dakota Office Products

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