Question

Hanover – Management Decision problems Snyders of Hanover, which sells about 80 million bags of pretzels, snacks chips, and organic snack items each year, had its financial department use spreadsheets and manual processes for much of data gathering and reporting. Hanover’s financial analyst would spend the entire final week of every month collecting spreadsheets from the heads of more than 50 departments worldwide. She would the consolidate and renter all the data into another spreadsheet, which would serve as the company’s monthly profit and loss statement. If a department needed to update its data after submitting the spreadsheet to the main office, the analyst had to return the original spreadsheet, the wait for the department to resubmit its data before finally submitting the updated data in the consolidated document.

1. Assess the impact of the above situation in delayed decision making and its business performance ?

2. As a manager what are your suggestions to improve the above process of data gathering and report generation In your view which type of Information System is required in the above scenario for dealing with the problem of online data processing and report generation ?

3. Why is it necessary for any organization to implement the Information System solution and how its is facilitating the organization in its digital transformation ?

Answer 1

In this situation, Snyders of Hanover is a company that sells about 80 million bags of pretzels, snack chips, and organic snack items each year. It's financial department used spreadsheets and manual processes for much of its data gathering and reporting. I guess they had a critical issue because they were using spreadsheets and manuaaly storing the data inspite of having sales of about 80 million bags of pretzels, snack chips, and organic snack items. Due to this, they spent much time in storing the data.

Initially, they stored data in various departments across the world. Then, this data was sent to main department to analyse. The Hanover's financial analyst would spend the entire final week of every month rentering all the data into another spreadsheet, that would serve as the company’s monthly profit and loss statement. A lot of time was consumed here. The fpcus of the problem is End-Of-Month accounting process. It is related to the way they make and publish their financial reports. They are only able to create the reports once in a month.

So, the impact of this situation on business performance and management decision making are as follows:-

• From the way they were collecting the data, it shows that they were not collecting all the necessary and important data as often as it was needed. So, it made it difficult to identify and record the changing demands and preferences on a particular product.
• As they were not able to update their cash flow regularly, it made them difficult to predict certain future events. And it made them difficult in long term strategy development.
• They were only able to estimate gross profit but not the performance of their working capital management.
• They require a lot of manpower and will increase more pressure on Human Resource Management (HRM) department. And increases labor cost too.

So, Snyders of Hanover company should implement a integrated digital database system. This integrated system will connect everyone in the company, together. In case there are any changes, the department is free to update it in the digital database and financial analyst would further update the database immediately within few minutes. Each department should be able to update their cash transactions in the database on daily basis.

Also, the financial analyst will have a cash forecasting spreadsheet that can predict the future cash flow. These basic implementations will make sure that the company is up-to-date and it will run smoothly.