MANAGERIAL APPLICATIONS OF IMFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FINAL REPORT ON HEALTH LITE YOUGURT COMPANY INDEX 1. INTRODUCTION 2. I DENTIFYING THE PROBLEM a) Lack Of Technology b)Lack Of Communication and, c) Lack of Management Structure. 3. Proposed Solution for the Identified Problems a) Hardware Solution and, b) Software Solution. 4. Redesigning the Information Technology plan to make the system more effective. INTRODUCTION Healthlite Yogurt Company is a fast growing producer of yogurt based-products, such as, low-fat yogurt and other related products.
write an essay my hobby
We Will Write a Custom Essay Specifically
For You For Only $13.90/page!
order now
The company has its corporate headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut with processing plants across the United States in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, and California. It operates in 20 sales regions, each with its own regional sales manager and roughly 30 sales representatives. Healthlite Yogurt Company has experienced recent growth. However, they are currently threatened by a rise in local competitors who are able to offer lower prices and faster delivery to distributors through the use of local production centers.
Healthlite Yogurt’s 3 main challenges are: * Lack of Technology restricts Healthlite from competing with faster growing competitors * Lack of Communications delays and complicates ordering process * Inability to Assess Performance of Sales Force and Products Healthlite at the moment operates on a central mainframe. Information is being entered through designated terminals, which delay the process. All the departments in the company use the same mainframe.
However, in order for these representatives and the sales offices to receive reports on customer account inquiries, rejection notices, or printouts for orders, they must wait for them to be printed and mailed to them from the regional offices. In addition, regional sales managers are forced to use mail to inform salespersons of current announcements, pricing discounts, and promotional campaigns. Salespersons also mail to send written copies of their monthly reports of sales calls to the regional headquarters. All of the information received by mail must then be inputted into the system.
The biggest and most chaotic problem at healthlite is the order processing system. In order for salespersons to place an order for their clients, they must write 1 hard-ticket and 2 or more forms per order which are sent to the corporate headquarters by fax or mail where they are sorted, and entered into the database. Around 500,000 order tickets are put into the system per week and daily orders are sent every evening to processing sites where shipping managers transport the goods to the client distributors. From start to finish the process can take upwards of 14 days.
The long delivery time is a weakness of Healthlite which local competition is currently exploiting. Problem Identification: a) Lack of technology. Healthlite Yogurt company main problem was inefficient order processing, they use to take 5-14 days to process one single order. Healthlite Yogurt Company is not able to deliver effective service. b) Lack of Communication. There is no proper communication between the sales representatives and higher management which caused several problems for the company to go down.
There was no proper marketing strategy approach they followed to promote their new products. c) Lack of Management Structure. This company lack high skilled people in the actual sales operating activity, which led this company 1. 5 million dollars discrepancy in their sales and order processing division. They had a faulty executive support system which does not have any connection between other divisions in the organization. 2) Proposed Solution: The proposed solution for this project was improvement in their hardware and software plan.
In this plan what we did was we thoroughly understand the system where exactly the problem was, so we took four top niche employees from each division and started working together. We identified that there is huge gap between the top level management and Operational level. So in order to bridge this gap we thought of coming out with a new technology plan which would solve all the problems within the company. a) Hardware solution: We thought we will have Laptop’s and iphones for the salespersons and also to all top level executives.
In place of normal PC we thought of having an High-Speed Internet Servers, which helps in optimizing the performance at the same time it can handle enough load. Hardware implementation architecture within the organization structure, how the communication takes place between the different divisions within the organization has shown below. The centraal mainframe server at head office is surrounded by a wrapper which gets the input from the Laptop and through iphone we transfer the data to the central database via a wrapper the wrapper will update back in to the database.
This communication can be vice-versa even. b) Software Problem: In the current System the orders were taken on paper and they need to be faxed or mailed back to the head office, So there is always a chance to misplace a mail due to any reason. so in order to avoid this problem we thought of integrating the complete process with the new web based portal called Internet Wrapper, this wrapper helps in receiving order from the terminal systems and had capability to update back into the database.
The Software system includes HTML wrapper, which contains development of Company’s Website, portal development and an Order Entry system. 3) Implementation of Technology Plan: In the Implementation process we identified what all is required to have a best software and hardware configuration system for the company which is feasible in terms off, 1) Economical Feasibility 2) Operational Feasibility and 3) Financial Feasibility. As part of the software solution we have thought to have an It division with new IT developers (Temporally Hired), to develop our website and portal which are part of wrapper development.
We had plan of having a High End Internet Servers with T-3 wiring network within the organization. Development of new order entry system. Implementation of oracle interactive dashboards. a) Re-designing of software Advantages of Oracle Dashboards: We can have single view look for all our reports, it is an easy method of analyzing the organizational performance. Advantages of Having Wrapper: b) Redesigning of Hardware As part of the hardware we thought of having 150 iMac’s and 700 Mac books and 850 iPhones, for the effective communication purpose
The cost for the order processing in terms of legacy system compared to that of new technology based. This Cost –based Analysis helps us understand how much we use to invest on un-necessary things for no reason and how the cost have come down due to the use of cutting edge technology. Cost Analysis: (Order Processing) Hardware/Software Cost Analysis: It shows how much money is required for the portal development, the hardware and software licensing and Employee payroll and the new Internet server costs.
Feasibility Study: As part of the development of the project we have taken care the feasibility of the project in terms of the following 4- major aspects and found that the propsed solution best suited to the company. To implement this project plan we follow a prototype approach. Using this prototype approach we have break down the bigger problem into series of steps like: Overview of Advantages Of having Technology In place of Traditional Legacy System:
Related essay samples:
- Executive Summery
- Kudler’s fine foods
- Dorfman Pacific Rolls Out a New Wireless Warehouse
- Xerox
- Software Applications and Information Systems
- Risk Assessment
- Smart 16BCE0431 Saransh Mittal 16BCE0642 Neelesh Gupta
- Apple – Company Background
- Computer Systems Of Ticket Distributors Information Technology Essay
- Microsoft troubles in china
- Atlantic Computer Case analysis
- Atlantic Computer Case analysis
- Purchasing and Implementing a Student Management System at Jefferson County School System
- Bangladesh Automated Cheque Processing System (Bacps)
- Cis 205 Information Systems Paper