Case Name :      Coloplast: Ten Years of Global Operations

Authors :           Marcus Moller Larsen, Torben Pedersen

Source :             Ivey Publishing

Case ID :            W12101

Discipline :        General Management

Case Length :    16 pages

Solution Sample availability : YES

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

In just a decade, the Danish health care product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a major transformation from a local Danish manufacturing company to a truly multinational corporation. In 2001, Coloplast conducted all its production in-house in three production facilities in Denmark. Ten years later, the company had relocated almost 90 per cent of the production to four different countries, with the majority in Hungary and China. However, a transformation of this caliber rarely comes without challenges. Coloplast’s relocation of production abroad had to a large extent been carried out through a trial-and-error process without an overarching corporate strategy. In this process, the company had experienced many challenges. Although Coloplast had by 2011 successfully identified and changed the critical issues created by the offshoring initiatives, the executive management now faced a substantial challenge in understanding what the company had learned over the last 10 years and how it could excel based on this history.