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Case Study

Tosama (A)

By Carlos Cordon, Thomas E. Vollmann, Inna Francis and Alexandru Ioan Mincu

7 pages

June 2004

Reference: IMD-6-0267

The case series presents a situation where an 80 year-old Slovenian sanitary products manufacturer is faced with the crisis situation that emerged from poor quality product delivered to the customers. The case deals with choices and decisions company had to make to come out of this crisis without damaging its reputation. Business savvy CEO, Janko Velkavrh realised that one of Tosama’s greatest assets is their reputation and everything should be done to protect it. It made good business sense to take care of customers not only in Tosama’s day to day operation, but even more so when things went wrong. One of the lessons learnt was that people can be very forgiving, but only if they feel you are acting in a ‘caring and compassionate’ way and acting as if you have nothing to hide.

Keywords

Disaster Management, Crisis Management, Consumer Goods, Production Management, Operations Management

Settings

Slovenia
November 2003

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

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Teaching note

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