PetGuardian by WANE

Integrated Business Launch Strategy

Integrated Core (I-Core) · Kelley School of Business, Indiana University · 2024

Strategy · Finance · Marketing · Operations · Management

This project was completed as part of Kelley’s Integrated Core, a team-based project designed around bringing together the major business functions covered during I-Core. Our six-person team was given WANE Corporation, a medical technology company looking to expand beyond its traditional healthcare market and build a stronger direct-to-consumer business. The proposed expansion centered on PetGuardian, a new line of technology-enabled pet safety products.

Our role was to evaluate the proposed launch as a business rather than from only one functional perspective. This meant looking at how the product should be positioned and marketed, how it could be produced and distributed, how the new operation should be managed, and whether the investment made financial sense. A major part of the project was understanding how those decisions affected one another rather than treating finance, marketing, operations, and management as separate problems.

The final recommendation was to move forward with PetGuardian. Our analysis found a positive investment case while also identifying the operating, organizational, and market decisions WANE would need to manage for the product to succeed.

Overview

On the marketing side, we looked at how PetGuardian could be positioned within the pet-safety market and which customers were most likely to value its combination of GPS tracking, health monitoring, and safety features. We identified new pet owners, technology-oriented pet owners, and service-animal owners as key segments, then developed positioning, branding, pricing, promotion, and distribution recommendations around those groups. Our team ultimately recommended using both online retail and veterinarian distribution to combine broad customer reach with the credibility of professional endorsement.

The operations analysis focused on how PetGuardian could actually be produced and brought to market. We compared worker-paced and machine-paced assembly systems, evaluated alternative chip suppliers using purchasing, ordering, and inventory costs, analyzed quality-control requirements, and developed a project schedule covering 23 activities. After identifying the critical path, the project schedule was shortened to provide additional time before the required launch deadline, with an estimated crashing cost of $169,400.

From a management perspective, we considered how WANE should organize and manage a new business area entering a market that was different from its traditional healthcare operations. The project looked at decision-making biases, organizational culture, employee socialization, performance management, motivation, and compensation. We recommended a combination of market-oriented and adaptive organizational characteristics intended to keep the new operation focused on customers while remaining flexible enough to operate in an unfamiliar market.

Finally, the finance analysis brought the project together as an investment decision. We estimated the project’s risk, calculated a required return using CAPM, forecast operating cash flows and capital requirements, and incorporated working capital, sunk costs, opportunity costs, and other relevant cash flows. The final analysis produced an estimated NPV of approximately $1.18 million and an IRR of 13.20%, compared with a required return of 9.10%.

Analysis

Recommendation

Move forward with the PetGuardian launch.

Our team concluded that the potential benefits of the project outweighed the risks involved. The positive NPV and IRR supported the investment financially, while the broader analysis provided a path for how WANE could enter the market through a combination of direct-to-consumer marketing, online and veterinarian distribution, an efficient operating model, and an organizational structure designed around the needs of the new business.

At the same time, we recognized that the financial decision alone was not enough to determine whether the launch would succeed. The outcome would also depend on consumer response, product quality, execution of the production schedule, marketing effectiveness, and WANE’s ability to adapt as it entered a market outside its traditional area of expertise.