Van Meter Industrial

Students in Professor Santhi Hejeebu's ECB:354 Managerial Economics course have had an extraordinary experience with a local company, Van Meter Industrial (VMI). First, the class toured the VMI location with Todd Ettleman, Vice President for Sales at VMI. Then, on March 15, they were joined in class by Barry Boyer, CEO, Mick Slinger, CFO, and Chris Dyar, Pricing Manager.

The students worked on a multi-faceted pricing problem. VMI has a very large number of products and services, more than many typical big-box supercenters. They explored  issues of pricing consistency across product groups and customer classes, uncertainties regarding VMI’s activity costs, pricing the value of its services, and understanding the ways in which product demand will be affected by price changes.

Students first worked intensively of VMI’s pricing data, visited VMI facilities, and discussed every aspect of the case with Mr. Slinger and Mr. Dyar. Then they presented their findings to Mr. Boyer, Mr. Slinger, and Mr. Dyar when they joined the students in class on campus.

Student Perspectives

They reminded us that we were working on an active case, otherwise our projects would have been much less pertinent to solving VMI’s problem. -- Joseph Dowdy '11

It was critical. Visiting VMI was the most important part in our studies and our final presentation couldn’t have been what it was without it. -- Kyle Davy '11