Holding Fast Case Study

1. This case starts out in a lab that is located in a building that is operated by Crescordia. Crescordia is a company that makes a range of products such as artificial hips and scalps but also is one of the few companies that sell fixation devices. At the beginning of the case Crescordia holds a seminar for orthopedic surgeons so they can better familiarize themselves with the products and procedures that are needed when dealing with using these fixation plates. During this seminar the CEO Peter Walsh enters excitedly to see what is going on. You can tell right from the start that he is a very big people person and is incredibly interested in finding out the needs and what surgeons are saying about the products that he puts out. After Peter Walsh enters the seminar is put on hold and they all go out to lunch. During lunch one of the surgeons launched into a story about having to remove a resorbable plate, which are fixation devices that instead of having to be removed by doctors after the bone is healed these would just disintegrate after the bone had been healed which would mean that you would not have to have surgery again to remove the plate.

The story however takes a sad turn as you find out that most resorbable plates have a lot of problems that have not been figured out and is still a technology that is not capable of doing what it says. The surgeons asked Peter Walsh when Crescordia would plan to launch its own resorbable’s and his response was that Crescordia is a company that has a reputation for quality and that resorbable’s were not at the stage where they would live up to what they set out to do. Resorbable’s are a huge potentially untapped market so Peter Walsh made it his first priority to find out where Crescordia is at with its resorbable’s. He talked with Gary Miskimen who is the head of R&D. He basically confirmed to Walsh that resorbable’s still are not perfect and that they could not do any more lab work because to find out what problems that they would need to solve they would have to actually test there resorbable’s on people.

A week later they had a meeting where Jane LaMott the vice president of sales was excited at the prospect of putting resorbable’s in their lineup of products while Chief marketer Diane Robinson was completely of the opposite opinion and thought it would be a huge misstep to bring resorbable’s as part of their product line. Nothing was settled at this meeting. The next day Walsh had a meeting with CFO Calvin Westbrook and asked him to weigh in on resorbable’s. Calvin Westbrook also expressed feelings of not having much faith in resorbable’s and making it seem like there was no need to rush into resorbable’s.

2. There are many drivers of tensions related to Crescordia offering resorbable’s to the market. First off Crescordia is a company that is known for the quality of products they put out and they have a reputation built on the fact that they only offer quality products. If they put resorbable’s on the market they would releasing a product that has a failure rate and would stain their reputation. Also if they were to turn to resorbable’s it would be a huge financial undertaking because they would have to offer a wide range of resorbable’s if they wanted to compete which would wouldn’t reach profitability if they didn’t scale production. One idea was that they should offer a smaller range of these products to just the pediatric market but was quickly shot down when there legal counsel Sam Maddox told them how bad it would look if they used children as the guinea pigs for this project.

Another point that was brought up by the CFO Calvin Westbrook is the fact that if even if they were able to make a product that would work than the whole industry would move towards resorbable’s and even though their profit margins would be higher, the costs of retooling equipment and factories would be such a high capital expenditure that it would not be worth it.

3. After thinking about it for some time I cannot support Crescordia launching resorbable’s on the market. I feel that it would be a huge misstep for them to jump into the market and that there is no harm in waiting it out and seeing how things develop in the industry. I think that the alternative path they should take is they should keep working on improving the non-resorbable plates that they put out and should not put much focus on resorbable’s. I think that there are many more pros to not focusing on resorbable’s than there is if they did focus on them. I find it hard to see why they would take the risk of launching a line of resorbable’s.

4. There are many pro’s in not going forward with resorbable’s. First off Crescordia will keep its high reputation because this will show that they do not want to rush products onto the market, especially products that still have many problems that need to be solved. Another advantage is that they can focus on the products they are good at making at can work towards improving the products that they are currently making. Also they will save themselves a huge financial risk because resorbable’s are not a proven product and they would have to change the way manufacture things and would have to retool their entire factories to make a huge change like this, that might not even pay off in the long run. It seems like if they were to focus on making resorbable’s it would be a high-risk and low-reward type of situation. There is not much that they can win from entering the resorbable market. One of the cons of not entering the resorbable market could be that they will lose businesses to their competitors that offer resorbable’s. But as long as they stick to making high quality products I feel that their competition will not be able to steal a significant amount of the market that they control.

5. I feel like this was a very interesting case to study. One of the things that I feel like I learned is that it is hard to predict what the market is interested in. During the case study it was presented that surgeons are very interested in resorbable’s and because of their interest some of the competing businesses have taken some of the customers that Crescordia had away. But at the same time it seems that surgeons have a huge mess to deal with when resorbable’s don’t work so it is hard for me to grasp how much surgeons are really in the market for resorbable’s and why companies would go for it when it’s been something that has been on the market for over 20 years and has not fulfilled what it said it could do over 20 years ago. So for me I can see why it is hard for business to be sure on what they should focus on making.

Another interesting thing that I have learned is that it is important for a wide range of people to provide input when you are trying to make a decision that can affect what you do so broadly. I thought it was interesting how in the beginning CEO Peter Walsh is very excited about getting resorbable’s off the ground but as the story goes on and he meets with different people with different responsibilities in the company he sees all the ways that it might not be a good idea and how you should examine alternatives on the things that you want to do. It shows me that you need a wide and diverse group of people to run a company because to me it shows that different opinions and viewpoints are very important because if you have a group of people that all share the same common views that you can run into problems of making decisions that can turn out bad just because you did not have people telling you what the problems would be with making that decision and I feel like that could be a big problem. So I feel a diverse work group is important for dealing with things like this example of if resorbable’s are worth putting out into the market.