Assignment 2: Arrowhead Mills (The Hain Celestial Group). The solid reputation of your consulting firm is paying off. An important client, The Hain Celestial Group has asked your firm to undertake a McKinsey style (sequential) value chain analysis that highlights the flow of activities in the breakfast cereal industry.Please identify the key activities (minimum of eight) and offer a very brief description of each. Identify where your company fits on the value chain, and where its major competitors fit. Also please identify some of the other companies (suppliers, customers, etc.) that participate in activities in the value chain. Please offer commentary as to whether there is evidence that some value chain components are growing or contracting. Finally, the client is asking for a brief note on some of the common risks faced by your company and its key competitors in this industry. Please offer five key risks. Please reference online information sources appropriately using endnotes. Please end the analysis with a discussion regarding implications. In other words, after gathering the data, so what? What does it mean? Requirement： Assignments will be to respond to the specific questions. These are described further on in this course outline. Each assignment shall be limited to three single spaced pages plus diagrams and appendices. A paper version or hard copy of the assignment shall be handed at the start of class which it is due. Please use APA style when citing and referencing information. 02/09/2015 Thoughts on Researching Companies and Industries Conor Vibert Ph.D. Picture this. You walk into work one day and your boss mentions that an exciting opportunity has arisen that has come of out left field involving a company and industry that your organization is not that familiar with. You will be part of a conference later in the day and all participants are expected to be up to speed as much as possible with the firm and industry in question. In many instances, a key word search using an engine such as Google will give you the information that you need. However this is not always the case. As a result it is often useful to know a few sources of information. The websites of companies host a wealth of information but frequently when we want to understand the behavior of companies, we need to move beyond what the company has to say about itself. The following paragraphs offer some ideas about how to do this. About Industries Students may find useful information about companies, organizations, markets, and industries in a number of different online locations. Biz.Yahoo http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ and Reuters http://www.reuters.com/finance/global-market-data offer corporate profiles, overviews of industries, lists of companies competing in the same industry that in turn link to profiles, news related to specific industries and companies, financial data, tools for benchmarking financial performance, profiles of corporate exec ...

1. Assignment 2: Arrowhead Mills (The Hain Celestial Group).
The solid reputation of your consulting firm is paying off. An
important client, The Hain Celestial Group has asked your firm
to undertake a McKinsey style (sequential) value chain analysis
that highlights the flow of activities in the breakfast cereal
industry.Please identify the key activities (minimum of eight)
and offer a very brief description of each. Identify where your
company fits on the value chain, and where its major
competitors fit. Also please identify some of the other
companies (suppliers, customers, etc.) that participate in
activities in the value chain. Please offer commentary as to
whether there is evidence that some value chain components are
growing or contracting. Finally, the client is asking for a brief
note on some of the common risks faced by your company and
its key competitors in this industry. Please offer five key risks.
Please reference online information sources appropriately using
endnotes. Please end the analysis with a discussion regarding
implications. In other words, after gathering the data, so what?
What does it mean?
Requirement：
Assignments will be to respond to the specific questions. These
are described further on in this course outline. Each assignment
shall be limited to three single spaced pages plus diagrams and
appendices. A paper version or hard copy of the assignment
shall be handed at the start of class which it is due. Please use
APA style when citing and referencing information.
02/09/2015
Thoughts on Researching Companies and Industries
Conor Vibert Ph.D.
Picture this. You walk into work one day and your boss

2. mentions that an exciting opportunity has arisen that has come
of out left field involving a company and industry that your
organization is not that familiar with. You will be part of a
conference later in the day and all participants are expected to
be up to speed as much as possible with the firm and industry in
question. In many instances, a key word search using an
engine such as Google will give you the information that you
need. However this is not always the case. As a result it is often
useful to know a few sources of information. The websites of
companies host a wealth of information but frequently when we
want to understand the behavior of companies, we need to move
beyond what the company has to say about itself. The following
paragraphs offer some ideas about how to do this.
About Industries
Students may find useful information about companies,
organizations, markets, and industries in a number of different
online locations.
Biz.Yahoo http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ and Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/finance/global-market-data offer
corporate profiles, overviews of industries, lists of companies
competing in the same industry that in turn link to profiles,
news related to specific industries and companies, financial
data, tools for benchmarking financial performance, profiles of
corporate executives and directors and information on
ownership structures. Along with this, they often identify key
regulators and professional and industry associations for each
industry. Companies competing in Canadian industries can be
found using the key search function found on Industry Canada’s
http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ccc-rec.nsf/en/Home web site.
How might the most recent information about an industry or
company be obtained? Why not try the keyword search
capabilities of news aggregators found through Google
(http://news.google.com) or Yahoo (http://news.yahoo.com).
A number of information sources do a very good job of offering
clear descriptions of industries. High Beam Business
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports, Plunkett

3. Research http://www.plunkettresearch.com/, Value Line
http://www.valueline.com/Stocks/Industries.aspx, Statista
http://www.statista.com/topics/ and Franchise Help
http://www.franchisehelp.com/industry-reports/industry-
information/ are free sources but focus primarily on U.S or
North American industry overviews and industry analysts.
Examples of Porter Five Forces overviews of a dozen industries
may be found in The Industry Handbook available from
Investopedia
http://www.investopedia.com/features/industryhandbook/. The
overviews also include key ratios and terms for the industries
being examined. Of interest as well is Hoovers. Although a pay
service http://www.hoovers.com/industry-analysis/industry-
directory/a-z.html, it offers a brief summary paragraph
describing the competitive landscape of industries of interest.
Global Edge, a creation of the Broad School of Business of
Michigan State University, http://globaledge.msu.edu/global-
insights is slightly different. It offers profiles of countries and
global industries with a focus on risks, trends, events, and trade
statistics. For risk profiles of countries for investors, one
interesting source is the website of A.M. Best
http://www3.ambest.com/ratings/cr/crisk.aspx.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov offers
insight about industries from the perspective of occupations. At
least one database from this government agency is important
and it is the Occupational Outlook Handbook
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/. What they do, work environment, pay,
job outlook and reviews of similar jobs are among the topics
covered for each of the 800 profiled occupations. The handbook
also categorizes by occupation groups enabling analysis of
similar or related jobs found in the same industry. The Bureau
of Labor Statistics also offers a database labeled Industries at a
Glance http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag211.htm.
Industry associations and government regulators are two other
important sources of information. These will often describe the
industry, offer insight into the key issues from the point of view

4. of members or the government, and identify trends and policies.
How are the industry players trying to change the competitive
landscape? What issues do companies in the industry have in
common? The American Society of Association Executives
http://www.asaecenter.org/Community/Directories/associationse
arch.cfm offers a link titled, Gateway to Associations which
allows users to search for industry associations by keyword.
Another source is Weddles Association Direct.
http://www.weddles.com/associations/index.cfm. In Canada, of
use is the Directory of Trade and Business hosted on the
Industry Canada website. http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ccc_bt-
rec_ec.nsf/eng/h_00001.html.
Regulators can help inform consumers and investors about
specific concerns related to companies and their products and
services. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration
www.fda.gov handles issues related to food, drugs and
cosmetics. The Consumer Product Safety Commission
www.cpsc.gov deals with product recalls. The Environmental
Protection Agency www.epa.gov focuses on the environment.
For accounting or financial reporting transgressions, check out
the SEC www.sec.gov Web site. In terms of a national body,
there is no Canadian equivalent to the SEC. Health Canada and
Environment Canada would serve as the equivalents in Canada
to the FDA and the EPA.
Many observations can be made about industries and their
make-up. If one wanted to map out some of the companies that
could fit on the value chain of a regional industry, how might
these companies be identified? For instance, if you were
interested in identifying companies that made and distributed
door handles or hammers? Depending on the ultimate market
served these might be suppliers for some companies in the chain
or manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, service providers or
customers for others. In Canada, you might have an interest in
using the online trade directories such as the Canadian Trade
Index, http://www.ctidirectory.com/, Frasers
http://www.frasers.com and Thomas Net

5. http://www.thomasnet.com. For the U.S. market, an example of
a broad category trade directory is Manta
http://www.manta.com/mb.
Where might one look for gossip or rumours about an industry
or the public corporations found within that industry? Why not
follow the online conversations in discussion forums found on
sites such as The Motley Fool www.fool.com but do take the
insights with a grain of salt.
As noted above, there are many different ways to look at an
industry. One approach that is often overlooked is related to
the patent profiles of industry competitors. Understanding
patent activity can help analysts identify industry competitors,
new technologies on the horizon, acquisition targets, companies
with upward momentum, key researchers and key technologies
driving new innovations among other things. The Canadian
patent regulator, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office
(CIP0) http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca and its American counterpart,
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
http://www.uspto.gov have created databases that are relatively
easy to search. The USPTO separates patent applications from
assigned patents allowing searchers to understand where efforts
are headed and who owns existing technologies respectively.
For patent applications, focusing in on specific patent classes
allows one to understand which companies might be in races to
develop specific technologies or drugs. Patents summaries in
the USPTO site are especially helpful for assigned patents. For
each patent, the summaries list the patents that the inventor(s)
have used to develop the invention as well as companies or
assignees who have used this patent. This offers an important
glimpse into who might be competitors or alliance partners as
well as companies that might potentially form an ecosystem.
Commercial sites such as Google Patents
http://google.com/patents and Patent Genius
http://www.patentgenius.com have simplified the task even
further. Google has simplified the information displayed for
each patent while Patent Genius allows easy searching by

6. inventor name, industry and product/or technology and date
foregoing the need to know the industry code or patent
classification.
About Companies
Where might one find annual reports and business plans for
publicly traded companies? If your interest is Canadian
companies, then check out SEDAR www.sedar.com. If your
interest is corporations whose shares trade on U.S. stock
exchanges, then try the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) www.sec.gov web site.
By definition information about private companies is more
difficult to access. Most private companies guard financial and
competitive information closely. Learning about them thus
presents a challenge to analysts. However, along with the
company website and press releases there are a number of ways
to gather information. One means is to use News Aggregators
such as Google News http://news.google.com to scan the online
media for insight. If the company is large, then another way to
access insight is to examine the annual reports (10K) or
business plans (S1) filed by publicly traded companies to the
U.S. Securities Commission http://www.sec.gov that also
happen to be competitors of the company in question. These
annual reports and business plans will list risk factors and often
competitors and key suppliers. They will often also describe
the general business environment. Much of this information may
apply equally to private sector competitors. Depending on the
make-up of the financial statements for the publicly traded
competitors, some of the ratios and margins may offer insight
about the performance of the private firm.
For small and medium sized private enterprises, there are a
number of databases that can help analysts understand their
financial picture. Industry Canada offers access to Canadian
Industry Statistics. It enables analysts to access information
using a search tool labelled Statistical Data by Industry where
industries are broken down by NAICS code

7. http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cis-
sic.nsf/eng/home?Open&src=mm2. In this instance Financial
Performance Data for each industry lists average profitability,
revenues and expenses. Industry Canada Financial Performance
Data http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/pp-pp.nsf/eng/home is a
related tool that allows an analyst to create a report driven by
NAICS code that provides industry average derived income
statements, balance sheets and financial ratios for lower, mid
and higher quartile performing companies. For U.S. firms,
BizStats http://www.bizstats.com/industry-financials.php
provides profit loss statements for a large number of industries
organized by a corporation or sole proprietorship and size.
There are other interesting tools available for understanding
business activity. World Freight Rates
http://worldfreightrates.com/freight offer an interactive online
tool to help gauge the costs of shipping goods via ocean, rail,
air, truck or break bulk to locations around the world. Included
in the calculations are commodity type, load type and whether
the goods need to be refrigerated or are hazardous in nature.
Spider Strategies http://www.spiderstrategies.com/kpi/ offers
examples of industry key performance indicators (KPI) sorted
by Department (HR, Finance, Marketing, Sales, I.T. and
Customer Service) and by twenty different Industries. It
suggests the use of these metrics when building company
specific balanced scorecards. In other words, these lists of KPI
help managers figure out what to measure when seeking to
building successful companies.
About Company Culture
When exploring a company's culture, remember, rarely will a
company say anything negative about its work environment.
Companies seek to portray a positive image. Their espoused
work culture will be communicated by a number of means
including their mission, vision and value statements, their job
ads and the speeches and presentations delivered by executives.
If the company is publicly traded, this information should be

8. found on their website. If a private company, some of it may be
found there. If you are serious about trying to learn about a
corporate culture, you will want to balance what is
communicated by the company with other observations. The
easiest way of doing so is to talk to a number of existing and
former employees as well as consultants or government officials
who have worked for or with the entity. Unfortunately, we are
not always able to talk to these individuals and may be
dependent upon secondary sources of information. If that is the
case, there are other ways of getting a feel for a work
environment and they include doing a key word search for
stories using a news aggregator such as Google News,
http://news.google.com reading company reviews in sources
such as Glassdoor http://www.glassdoor.com/reviews/, or
Career Bliss, http://www.careerbliss.com and exploring industry
focused job profiles found in databases such as the
Occupational Outlook Handbook of the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics http://www.bls.gov/ooh/. Description for occupations
in an industry under the headings of “What they do”, “Work
environment”, “Pay”, and “Job outlook” are often helpful
allowing observers to understand what employees in the
company do. This can be important. The behavior of individuals
trained in a profession will be influenced by their training and
the code of conduct of the profession. On the other hand
minimum wage work environments can often be characterized
by high turnover making it difficult for a company to instill a
lasting culture in all areas of the company. Finally, some
company work environments where a union is present, or where
offices are located in different geographic regions, may be
characterized by more than one work culture. Two other
government sites worth considering are the Equal Opportunity
Employment Commission http://www.eeoc.govand
theOccupational Safety Health
Administrationhttp://www.osha.gov. Both offers databases that
can be searched by company name to discover workplace equity
or safety violations. Researchers might also consider glancing

9. at CSR Hub,http://www.csrhub.comwhich offers a searchable
company and industry CSR (corporate social responsibility) and
sustainability ratings and information database.
Along with Career Bliss http://www.careerbliss.com/salary/and
Glassdoor http://www.glassdoor.ca/index, Simply Hired
http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries.html is another site that
offers insight into industry and company salaries.. World
Salaries, http://www.worldsalaries.org hosts the International
Average Salary Income Database, one that offers an
international comparison of average salary for various
professions, and an international comparison of average
personal income & expenditure
An important influencer of corporate culture is the nation within
which a business unit resides. It is reasonable to assume that
for a Japanese company, the business culture permeating its
head office in Osaka, Tokyo or Kyoto, may not perfectly carry
over to its offices in England or Germany or Brazil. The same
can be said for a company whose headquarters can be found in
Houston, Texas. Despite the most sincere of efforts, its work
environments in Calgary, Perth, and London may differ quite
considerably, even with a shared common language.
Cultural dimensions of different countries, as highlighted by
Dutch management scholar, Geert Hofstede, http://geert-
hofstede.com/countries.html, national communications
characteristics as developed by fellow Dutchman, Franz
Trompenaars http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/seven-
dimensions.htm and country culture profiles created and made
available to the public by the government of Canada
http://www.intercultures.ca/cil-cai/countryinsights-apercuspays-
eng.asp can quickly help an analyst understand differences in
business cultures. These differences will need to be managed by
any company seeking to develop shared understanding and
practices among its workforce. Another excellent source of
information are country reviews found on the website of World

10. Business Culture http://www.worldbusinessculture.com/.
International Business Websites
Source

11. Website
Country Specifics
DFAIT
http//intercultures.ca
National Culture Profiles
Kwintessential
http://kwintessential.co.uk
National Culture
Geert Hofstede.com
http://www.geert-hofstede.com
Communication Styles
World Health Organization
http://www.who.int/countries/
Health
World Weather.org
http://www.worldweather.org
Weather
U.S. Energy Information Administration
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/contents.html
National Energy profiles
Earth Trends
http://earthtrends.wri.org/
National Environment profiles
Funding Universe
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/
Company Profiles and Histories
Population Reference Bureau
http://www.prb.org
National Demographic figures
Global Property Guide
http://www.globalpropertyguide.com
Global Real Estate

12. Prevention Web
http://www.preventionweb.net/english/countries/
Global Disaster Risks
World Mapper
http://www.worldmapper.org
Maps of the world by subject
U.S. Geological Survey
http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/country/
National Mineral profiles
Export Development Canada
http://www.edc.ca/search/CountryInformation.asp?slang=e
Country business profiles
U.S. State Department
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/
Country Briefing Notes
WTO
http://www.doingbusiness.org
National Business Regulations – comparative
World Bank
http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home
World Bank sponsored governance indicators for countries
around the world
Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
http://www.business-humanrights.org/Categories/
Issues by country, industry and company
Crocodyl
http://www.crocodyl.org/
Collaborative corporation watchdog information site. Company
profiles and issues
Corporate Watch
http://www.corpwatch.org
Corporate Watchdog
Labour Net
http://www.labournet.org

13. Global labour network
Marketsize.com
http://www.marketsize.com
A small research company that reports on Market sizes of
different industry. A pay service but with a free blog that offers
that offer lots of examples of different industries.
Trading Economics
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/
Offers country level trade statistics
Global Edge
http://globaledge.msu.edu/Global-Insights
Business profiles of countries and global industries with a
discussion of risks, trends, events, trade statistics, key
companies
Coface Trading Safely
http://www.trading-safely.com/
Coface Country & Sector Risk Rating
Alexa.com
http://www.alexa.com
Tracks website traffic. Helps to sources for online advertising
Google Insight
www.google.com/trends
Tracks Google searches by geography. Enables target market
identification
Internet World Statistics
http://www.internetworldstats.com/

14. Usage and population statistics
Net Market Share
http://www.netwmarketshare.com
Market share reports for internet technologies such as browsers,
operating systems, search engines
Wayback Machine
http://www.archive.org/index.php
Internet Archive
1