Ananth Raman

10 Results

 

Sharpening Your Skills: Understanding Customers

In these previous articles, professors discuss a range of topics about customers: why they are not always right; understanding their motivations; providing them dramatically enhanced services; and making things right when you don't meet their expectations. Open for comment; 1 Comment posted.

When Supply-Chain Disruptions Matter

William Schmidt and Ananth Raman

Disruptions to a firm's operations and supply chain can be costly to the firm and its investors. Many companies have been subjected to such disruptions, and the impact on company value varies widely. Do disruption and firm characteristics systematically influence the impact? In this paper, the authors identify factors that cause some disruptions to be more damaging to firm value than others. Insight into this issue can help managers identify exposures and target risk-mitigation efforts. Such insights will also help investors determine whether a company is exposed to more damaging disruptions. Read More

Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model

Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai, Ananth Raman, and and William Schmidt

Why might firms make operational decisions that purposefully do not maximize expected profits? This model looks at the question by developing scenarios using the example of inventory management in the face of an external investor. The research was conducted by Vishal Gaur of Cornell University, Richard Lai of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ananth Raman and William Schmidt of Harvard Business School. Read More

Empathy: The Brand Equity of Retail

Retailers can offer great product selection and value, but those who lack empathy for their customers are at risk of losing them, says professor Ananth Raman. Open for comment; 15 Comments posted.

The Impact of Supply Learning on Customer Demand: Model and Estimation Methodology

Nathan Craig, Nicole DeHoratius, and Ananth Raman

"Supply learning" is the process by which customers predict a company's ability to fulfill product orders in the future using information about how well the company fulfilled orders in the past. A new paper investigates how and whether a customer's assumptions about future supplier performance will affect the likelihood that the customer will order from that supplier in the future. Research, based on data from apparel manufacturer Hugo Boss, was conducted by Nathan Craig and Ananth Raman of Harvard Business School, and Nicole DeHoratius of the University of Portland. Read More

Rocket Science Retailing: A Practical Guide

Ananth Raman

How can retailers make the most of cutting-edge developments and emerging technologies? Book excerpt plus Q&A with HBS professor Ananth Raman, coauthor with Wharton professor Marshall Fisher of The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics Are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance. Read More

Incorporating Price and Inventory Endogeneity in Firm-Level Sales Forecasting

Saravanan Kesavan, Vishal Gaur, and Ananth Raman

Benchmarking and forecasting firm level performance are key activities for both managers and investors. Retailer performance can be tracked using a number of metrics including sales, inventory, and gross margin. For operational reasons, the sales, inventory, and gross margin for a retailer are interrelated. Retailers often use inventory and margin to increase sales; and sales, conversely, provide input to the retailer's decisions on inventory and margins. Inventory and margin also influence each other. This research uses firm-level annual and quarterly data for a large cross-section of U.S. retailers listed on NYSE, AMEX, or NASDAQ to construct a model that examines the interrelationships among sales per store, inventory per store, and margin. Read More

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

Suddenly your supply chain is full of weak links, everything from terrorism to political instability to dock strikes. Could you and your customers withstand a disruption? Read More

Moving from Supply Chains to Supply Networks

Ananth Raman and Roy D. Shapiro

Dramatic change is taking place in today's supply chain, say HBS professors Ananth Raman and Roy Shapiro, and it's up to the general manager to assemble a team that can implement the new principles and practices the change requires. Read More

Rocket Science Retailing

Retailers and e-tailers have enormous amounts of data available to them today. But to take advantage of that data they need to move toward a new kind of retailing, one that blends the instinct and intuition of traditional systems with the prowess of information technology. Read More