An MBA elective called “Projects in Operations Management” typically attracts only a small group of engineers interested in manufacturing and the supply chain. In 1993, a diverse group of INSEAD business school students defied this norm after I promised to use manufacturing simply as a lens to focus on the general manager’s challenge, “How do we make money?” We would visit factories in very different industries and bring back to the classroom issues ranging from sales management to technology creation. Ultimately, we visited five blue-chip global businesses:
WhiteGoodsCo: This plant produced all the top-loading washers that WhiteGoodsCo made in Europe. Its challenges were comparable to those of other, similar ...
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