Question

MGMT HARDWARE, runs a chain of fourteen (14) building supplies stores located in four (4) Caribbean countries. The company caters for a wide set of products and services including, building materials, home delivery, household materials, retail sales, online ordering, drive through sales and order-online-pickup-in-store sales. The company has a centrally branded ecommerce website that caters to the needs of all four (4) countries and presents a consistent look and feel to all customers.

The locations within each country connect over a Metro-E wide area network (WAN) provided by FLOW, but there is no country-to-country connectivity. Mainly because the company grew by mergers and acquisitions, not all locations use the same Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

Each store also has an “offline” server that ensures the location can still sell and receive stock when the WAN goes down. Within a country, each store has a local Point-of-Sale (POS) but these all replicate back to a central hub in the main country office. Replication occurs once every 15 minutes, so the country head office is virtually up-to-date, in real time and can see, at a glance, transactions in each store.

As a new employee of MGMT HARDWARE, your manager wants you to produce some reports, related to stock and sales for an upcoming trade show that the purchasing team will be attending.

Congratulations, you have been promoted! You are now a manager in one of the departments of MGMT HARDWARE, and you get to choose your department.

Prior to the Metro-E, the company did not have a distributed POS, and sales reports from each site were manually combined in excel for analysis. In a similar way each location had its own telephone system. Now the company even allows VPN connectivity for the purchaser, when on business trips, to access reports and use her soft-phone. The Metro-E, VPN and internet access have changed everything.

NOTES

1. Congratulations, you have been promoted!
2. You have been placed in a group of 5 or 6 group-mates. You are required to share with and critique information in the group.
3. This is an exercise where you get to experience and demonstrate several concepts in gathering, analyzing and using information for management reporting.
4. You are now a manager in one of the departments of the company. Each of you will select:

• ONE Management Level that you will represent (operational, management/tactical or strategic). More than one person will have the same level.
• ONE department that you will represent. A department can only be represented ONCE in the group. First‑come, first-served allocation method.

Once you have chosen a persona, all contributions MUST be delivered from the perspective of that persona.

REQUIRED                                                                                

Management Reporting

You are attending a number of routine meetings that are conducted online. You are to post questions and response with information related to your analysis. Posts can be conversational among managers asking and responding to questions. There is no requirement for groups to meet outside of the course for this discussion, as it is expected that the meetings/posts will proceed in a manner similar to messaging with a corporate collaboration tool.

Forum 1: Introduce yourself, identifying your Management Level and your Functional Area

For your FIRST discussion post state your management level and department you will represent. No two students should choose the same department.

For example: CIO (strategic) of the IT department (functional area).

Forum 2: Discuss how the Metro-E can contribute with respects to both the POS and the company’s telephone systems

1. From the perspective of your department and management level:
   1. Suggest ONE advantage for the POS and ONE advantage for the phones.
   2. Request information from TWO other departments that could assist in your investigation. Please specify both the TYPE, and specific CONTENTS of the report you are requesting (Unit 3 types of output)

Forum 3: Discuss how the metro-E and the internet can contribute with respects to backups and disaster recovery.

1. From the perspective of your department and management level, discuss the implications of backup and recovery over Metro-E and into the cloud.
   1. Suggest ONE advantage and ONE disadvantage.
   2. Discuss ONE security consequence that could arise from VPN access to the company’s IT infrastructure.
   3. Critique TWO post made by group mates from other departments

Forum 4: Create the swim-lane process diagram

1. Choosing any one of the channels, explicitly mentioned in the scenario, via which a customer may purchase a good or a service, DESIGN and DRAW a high level “as-is” process diagram depicting how the customer would order/buy, pay for and get the product or service.

Forum 5: Summarise and make Recommendations

1. Summarise the information shared thus far, and discuss TWO findings about your analysis from your management level that can be used to justify the Metro-E and VPN solutions. From the following models - subscriptions (usually all you can eat), a la carte (pay for what you use) and “freemium” (uses advertising revenue to provide content for free), make TWO recommendations on ways to start generating more revenue via the eCommerce website.
2. YOU CAN DO IT!!!!

Answer 1

Forum 1: Introduce yourself, identifying your Management Level and your Functional Area

For your FIRST discussion post state your management level and department you will represent. No two students should choose the same department.

For example: CIO (strategic) of the IT department (functional area).

Ans: Manager (marketing & sales ) of the procurement department

Forum 2: Discuss how the Metro-E can contribute with respects to both the POS and the company’s telephone systems

1. From the perspective of your department and management level:

1. Suggest ONE advantage for the POS and ONE advantage for the phones.

2. Request information from TWO other departments that could assist in your investigation. Please specify both the TYPE, and specific CONTENTS of the report you are requesting (Unit 3 types of output)

All the customers may not be familiar with the new technologies,

Advantages for the POS.

Local customers can reach easily.

Evaluation can be done directly

Advantage for the Phone

Coast and time saving

The other Two department that assist for the information:

Human Resource management Department

Finance department

Forum 3: Discuss how the metro-E and the internet can contribute with respects to backups and disaster recovery.

1. From the perspective of your department and management level, discuss the implications of backup and recovery over Metro-E and into the cloud.

1. Suggest ONE advantage and ONE disadvantage.

2. Discuss ONE security consequence that could arise from VPN access to the company’s IT infrastructure.

3. Critique TWO post made by group mates from other departments

1)Advantage:

Data availability at any time

Disadvantage:

Network availability is mandatory

2) Limitations in access

Infrastructure should be mapped with VPN requirements

3) Availability of Resource

Financial management

Forum 4: Create the swim-lane process diagram

1. Choosing any one of the channels, explicitly mentioned in the scenario, via which a customer may purchase a good or a service, DESIGN and DRAW a high level “as-is” process diagram depicting how the customer would order/buy, pay for and get the product or service.

Forum 5: Summarise and make Recommendations

1. Summarise the information shared thus far, and discuss TWO findings about your analysis from your management level that can be used to justify the Metro-E and VPN solutions. From the following models - subscriptions (usually all you can eat), a la carte (pay for what you use) and “freemium” (uses advertising revenue to provide content for free), make TWO recommendations on ways to start generating more revenue via the eCommerce website.

2. YOU CAN DO IT!!!!