Analysis of

The Cameron Balloon Company

….a class exercise in company analysis ….

Abstract

This exercise is designed to assist you in understanding multiple business aspects of an entire company and for you to be able to create and answer questions about how this company works. The objective of the exercise is to enable you to be able to organize the asking of questions to a representative of a company you will study later during the semester.

The company is the Cameron Balloons factory located in Bristol, UK. This company was selected because of the Virtual Factory tour and detailed analysis provided by biz-ed – a website dedicated to business education. We can use the materials that they have created in order to understand the business of the Cameron Balloons Factory. Our objectives are:

• Examine the operation of a small factory that produces a product that is relatively straightforward to understand.
• Analyze each part of the factory to determine if there are ways to improve operations and quality
• From this exercise, formulate questions that you can either (1) ask organizations that you study or (2) ask yourselves as you build your own business plan.

Homework prior to coming to class:

1. Examine the Cameron Balloons website
2. Read the BizEd Virtual Factory analysis of Cameron Balloons
3. Consider the questions we provided to help you analyze an organization.
4. Be prepared to answer the following questions:
1. What are Cameron Balloons main products? How do they produce their products?
2. What do the people at Cameron Balloon do? How many are there?
3. How solid is CB financially?

In-Class

1. Review the factory and the industry (5 minutes)
2. Review issues about the operation of the factory (5 minutes)
3. Form groups to answer the starter questions below as a warm-up exercise
4. First, consider the questions below and the more general organization study questions.
5. Spend about 20 to 30 minutes in your group, reviewing and answering the starter questions below
6. Compare the starter questions with org study questions.
7. Your task is to create a set of questions that you would ask (and an organization for asking the questions) Cameron Balloons, if you had the opportunity to interview them. The reason for this exercise is to prepare you to create questions for an organization that you will pick to study later in the semester. Assume in an actual interview, you would have one hour in person or by phone to ask questions. Spend the remainder of the time available creating and organizing questions.
8. Post the questions that you want to ask on the Blog. (we will create an area for posting). Consider how to acquire information in a short interview - what are the best questions to ask - how should the questions be phrased? Figure out a schema for asking questions and post the schema on the Blog (e.g., ask questions about marketing, then finance, then strategy, then production....??).
9. Homework for reflection (individual): (a) Review postings from teams and compare what your team asked with what other teams asked. Reflect on the spectrum of questions generated. (2) Are the general organization study questions enough - how would you change them? (3) What do you think about the schema for organizing question asking that various teams posted on the Blog?

Starter Questions about Cameron Balloons(CBs):

1. What are the markets for CBs? Types of balloons? Where does most of their revenue come from?
2. How large is CBs? How many people? Sales, age, growth? Margins? How does CBs margin compare to your sensor company?
3. What about automation – what is CBs position? Why?
4. How is financing done – their ratios:
   1. Profit Margin
   Liquidity: current assets/current liabilities, acid test = current assests - stock/current liabilities
5. Who are competitors – mergers – why?
6. Where does the capital that CBs needs to operate come from?
7. What kind of people work at CBs – what's the background of Don Cameron, when did he start the company?
8. What does a balloon cost?
9. How do you make a plant that produces balloons? What do you think of the CBs plant? Would you organizae it differently?
10. How does CBs advertise - are there other methods?
11. Is CBs a for-profit or a not-for-profit? How much profit does it make each year?
12. What do the staff do – there are 125 of them – how does the company work?
13. What would make a good perceptual map? Flying – advertising, amateur—professional – equivalent to the performance – size map in sensor world.
14. How could Cameron Balloons grow? Do the websites give any hint?
15. What could they do to improve cash flow?
16. How can CBs find out what their competitors are doing?
17. Comment on the production techniques that CB uses -- what would you do about automation?
18. CAD - a key element in the CB activities - should they go with a commercial package?
19. What are ways that CBs can maintain quality control?
20. What do you know or can find out about the industry in which CBs operates?