Interface's Evergreen Services Agreement

Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2003 (Revised June 2003)

Interface's Evergreen Services Agreement

Abstract

In an attempt to reduce its ecological footprint, Interface Americas, a leading manufacturer of commercial carpet tile, has launched the Evergreen Services Agreement (ESA)--a lease agreement that provides would-be carpet purchasers with comprehensive floor-covering services (color, texture, warmth, beauty, acoustics, and safety). Under ESA, Interface retains ownership of all carpet material, thereby ensuring proper recycling. Despite active media attention and a lot of interested calls from potential buyers, Interface is having difficulty selling ESA. CEO Dan Hendrix is at a crossroad and must decide whether to continue support for ESA or to focus on other initiatives. This case, grounded in a failed negotiation with the University of Texas, Houston, details a discussion of the difficulties of structuring a long-term lease agreement, defining a new service value proposition for the customer, and developing a sustainable business model for product-related services.

Keywords: Business Model; Product; Environmental Sustainability; Innovation and Invention; Leasing; Consumer Products Industry; Houston;

Format: Print

20 pages

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Citation:

Oliva, Rogelio, and James Quinn. "Interface's Evergreen Services Agreement." Harvard Business School Case 603-112, February 2003. (Revised June 2003.)

Based on an extensive program of case-writing and teaching on risk management, we identify three categories of risk and elaborate on the ways companies can identify and mitigate them, with particular emphasis on strategy execution risks.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2006

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

To date, little research has been done on managing the organizational and political dimensions of generating and improving forecasts in corporate settings. We examine the implementation of a supply chain planning process at a consumer electronics company, concentrating on the forecasting approach around which the process revolves. Our analysis focuses on the forecasting process and how it mediates and accommodates the functional biases that can impair the forecast accuracy. We categorize the sources of functional bias into intentional, driven by misalignment of incentives and the disposition of power within the organization, and unintentional, resulting from informational and procedural blind spots. We show that the forecasting process, together with the supporting mechanisms of information exchange and elicitation of assumptions, is capable of managing the potential political conflict and the informational and procedural shortcomings. We also show that the creation of an independent group responsible for managing the forecasting process, an approach that we distinguish from generating forecasts directly, can stabilize the political dimension sufficiently to enable process improvement to be steered. Finally, we find that while a coordination system—the relevant processes, roles and responsibilities, and structure—can be designed to address existing individual and functional biases in the organization, the new coordination system will in turn generate new individual and functional biases. The introduced framework of functional biases (whether those biases are intentional or not), the analysis of the political dimension of the forecasting process, and the idea of a coordination system are new constructs to better understand the interface between operations management and other functions.

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Business or Company Management; Supply Chain Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Planning; Electronics Industry;

Citation:

Oliva, Rogelio, and Noel Watson. "Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 07-024, October 2006. (Revised March 2007, January 2008.) View Details

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In most organizations, supply chain planning is a cross-functional effort. Functional areas such as sales, marketing, finance, and operations traditionally specialize in portions of the planning activities, which results in conflicts over expectations, preferences, and priorities. We report findings from a detailed case analysis of a successful supply chain planning process. In contrast to traditional research on this area, which focuses on incentives, responsibilities, and structures, we adopt a process perspective and find that integration was achieved despite an incentive structure which did not support it. By drawing a distinction between the incentive landscape and the planning process, we identify process as an additional mediator, beyond structure and responsibilities, that can affect organizational outcomes. Thus, organizations may be capable of integration while different functions retain different incentives to maintain focus on their stakeholders' needs. We hypothesize that achieving alignment in the execution of plans can be more important than informational and procedural quality. We close by discussing the implications of our findings for organizations and researchers.

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Interface's Evergreen Services Agreement

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