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Case Study

Sky Deutschland (B): How supply chain management enabled a dramatic company turnaround

By Ralf W. Seifert and Katrin Siebenbürger Hacki

16 pages

December 2016

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Reference: IMD-7-1806

Sky Germany is the leading pay TV provider in Germany and Austria. In 2010, the company was losing money and facing a lot of operational challenges such as a slow subscriber growth, a high customer churn rate, high fixed costs and frequent product stock-outs. In 2010 Sebastian Hauptmann joined Sky as VP of Logistics to help turn the company around. He had to act swiftly to address short-term problems while developing and implementing the strategy for long-term operational success. He put in place a multi-year strategic turnaround program led by supply chain team, a culture of continuous improvements (CI), and a world-class team. By 2014 all important KPI’s had improved significantly, and the company was on the path to turnaround, largely driven by the wide-ranging improvements in supply chain management. In 2016, for the first time in its history, Sky Deutschland reported positive operating results. With his continued success, Sebastian successively increased his responsibilities to become first SVP of Supply Chain, Procurement & CI and then EVP of Operations in 2016. The German Pay TV market remains a large opportunity for Sky Deutschland and rapid technology changes in TV and media present new challenges to the Sky group across Europe.

Learning Objective

Introducing core supply chain concepts such as SCOR®, S&OP, CPFR and cleansheet costing.
The case will challenge participants to move from concepts to implementation.
The A and B case spans a timeframe of ca. 4.5 years and allows for engaging action play and group work by participants.

Keywords

Pay Television, Supply Chain, Turnaround, Operations, Logistics, Supplier, Time Reduction, Warehousing, Tender Strategy, Continuous Improvement, Lean Management, Life Cycles, High Performance Team, Leadership, Transformation

Settings

Germany
Sky Deutschland, Media, Media, Television
2010 - 2016

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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