MIT Sloan Operations Management Case Studies

On October 29, 2018, Indonesia’s Lion Air flight 610, a nearly new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet, plunged into the Java Sea at 400 miles per hour, killing all 189 people on board. Eight days later Boeing issued a bulletin to all 737 MAX 8 and 737 MAX 9 operators stating that “erroneous angle-of-attack data” ...

Creates awareness on the importance of measuring workers’ financial wellness, enables discussion of the difference between market wages and living wages and highlight why benchmarking the market for frontline workers often results in high turnover, inability to focus on the job, low productivity and...

The Project Management Simulation is a realistic, interactive system dynamics “management flight simulator” in which participants play the role of project managers for a complex project.

The Beer Distribution Game, one of the oldest and most widely used management simulations, is now available online as an interactive multiplayer websim.

Develops a historical perspective for why some jobs are called “low-skill,” how much they pay, who performs them, and their working conditions, introduces the relationship between the skill level of a job and who is doing the job.Discuss how assumptions about work affects workers, pay, and job desig...

This case describes how leaders at Mud Bay, a chain of pet products based in Pacific Northwest, changed the way they operated their business from 2014 to 2017. They adopted a framework that included heavy investment in people with operational choices that leverage that investment by increasing produ...

In July 2015, MaryAnn Camacho joined Quest Diagnostics’s National Customer Service (NCS) organization as its Executive Director. Quest was the leading provider of diagnostic services and solutions in the United States. Camacho was hired to turn around an organization that had gone through a complex ...

In late 2004, Walt Bernstein, the director of production control for Toyota Motor Manufacturing’s Macon, Georgia operation, was notably frustrated with the plant manager for ChassisCo, a Toyota supplier. There were quality and conformance issues with the rear suspension cradle that ChassisCo was man...

Demonstrates how a start-up can disrupt an established industry known for mediocre service and bad jobs with a good jobs strategy—a human-centered operations strategy that combines investment in frontline employees with carefully made operational choices and strong commitment to values, provides an ...

Surfaces the multifaceted nature of organizational change processes; shed light on how resistance to change can be managed and overcome in a context with highly-skilled, semi-autonomous professionals; and, highlight the Three Lens Framework on organizational processes.