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We evaluated our company’s position in the industry, and found ourselves in an excellent starting position to further develop our products and match them to the industry’s needs. Our market share is adequate and we can advance further with our strategy improve and reposition our products in the coming years. We have underutilized capacity, which we intend to improve, while increasing automation to reduce costs. We have plans to improve our promotion to improve product awareness and with the appropriate product lines we will increase price to improve margins and better align our high-end product image. Our current financial position is optimistic, showing our leverage (Assets/Equity) at 2.0, when our goal is to maintain 1.5-2.0 overall. By utilizing the analysis tools we are learning what elements are driving demand, how to effectively tailor our products through R&D, how best to adjust our marketing and pricing, while lowering input costs, in order to improve margins and to ensure our stakeholders are all satisfied.

Inferior Company Leadership - President Barry Louden failed to manage the business at a high level, recognize the warning signs, and proactively deploy a strategy for improvement. He fired his accountant and allowed the company to flounder, displaying no sense of urgency, taking on increasing amounts of debt, and failing to reach out to Ashmark for help until it was too late.

We adjusted focus to our niche market, sold off capacity in the low end and traditional markets, and proceeded to decrease our production going into the next round. While selling capacity was the correct financial decision to combat our emergency loan, we were then left with stock outs in all of our product lines. As a result, we continued to struggle with overproduction and avoiding stock outs, but made improvements resulting in less drastic inventory swings in the later

My strategy seemed to work well for the first two years but then it became evident that I was losing market share in the NiMH business. I decided to cut down R&D in that division too early and that caused me to miss my sales targets. As I lost market share in my core business, the volume effect from my decision to lower NiMH prices did not compensate enough to allow that division to remain profitable. Suddenly, I had a very tight R&D budget to work with (as it was based on sales projections) and limited cash could be allocated to the improvement of the ultracapacitors business. I also reacted too late to the shift in customers’ demand for Power Packs products from Power Tools products, which caused late and lower-than-needed investments in other products’ features such as self-discharge (high priority for both NiMH and ultracapacitors).

| * Not utilizing development centers to their fullest capacity * Estruck has a declining performance * EGreen has not been performing as expected * Our company is slowly losing market share * Our cars are not the utilizing the technology upgrades

New, high-tech product. Could be destabilized by introduction of much lower cost alternative in a few years.

Product Innovation – Innovation of new products had failed many times and MTI has lost reputation with Wall Street. This process had been placed on the backburner and when the CEO came on board there were only six products in the pipeline. Therefore, to be successful in the future, MTI needs to invest more in R&D and focus on delivering new products.

Accordingly, “major new-product development activity was replaced by incremental product line extensions” (p.56) that resulted in a major revenue stall. The premature core abandonment cause is illustrated with the Kmart example. While the company was investing in a range of unrelated businesses searching for growth, Wal-Mart developed effective distribution and inventory systems. Kmart’s management failed to monitor and match these systems and fell far behind its rival. Hitachi’s example illustrates the talent bench shortfall. One of the leading causes of the stall was the company had executive management that lacked capabilities.

There are some problems that deal with the company as a whole. Does the company want to wait until they are “going down” to think of new innovations? The company knows that they can’t just sit without change. In an ever changing market, a company that wants to be successful must keep up

The industry witnessed several industry level stock outs, because of low production capacities. Ideally most should have been made of the situation. We should have seen the opportunities and worked to achieve way beyond our set goals.

One of the main challenge that this company will face is losing a good reputation of company and this firm globally will be known.

They had this problem because they are not familiar with how to launching a completely brand new product line. This is outside of their comfort zone and therefore it has effectively stalled the product line due to lack of interest, conflicting interests, decentralized teams, and engineering issues. Individuals were not working cross-functionally but instead they focused heavily on their specific

After analyzing the results from the previous quarter, it was determined that the prices set for each segment were not sufficient. Product sales priority were also not properly adjusted. With the R&D investments, sales priorities needed to be changed for the main focus to become the most profitable market segments. Prices were not competitive which in turned decreased revenue, market share, and profitability. To become more competitive we altered the prices in each market segment. The Workhorse product was the first to change, the price was lowered to $2500 in an attempt to increase sales; at this price Team 4 was still making a profit on this product, as well as making the price much more competitive. The Workhorse sales priority was also lowered to 3rd in Americas and 4th in APAC and EMEA. This product was not selling as well as we had hoped, and was no longer as profitable as it once was which led to this decision. Next, the Innovator product’s price was adjusted; this involved a price increase to $4100. This price was adjusted to include the new

Once they analysed what were the main issues that led the company into that situation, two were the main problems. First of all, the product portfolio was unprofitable, more than the 94% (Breen 2013).

Leaving technology advances less effective as originally presumed. Still no resolution to solve manufacturing / benchmarking and expanding branded market segments