Question

Snyders of Hanover, which sells about 80 million bags of pretzels, snack chips, and organic snack items each year, had its financial department use spreadsheets and manual processes for much of its 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 then consolidate and reenter 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 and 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 is it facilitating the organization in its digital transformation?

Answer 1

Snyders of Hanover, had a big issue for storing their data. They were storing all the sales data manually, though they are selling 80 million bags of pretzels, snack chips, and organic snack items each year. And it consumed a lot of time for them to store data. Firstly, they store the data on a spreadsheet in different departments of the world and then only they send it to the main department where financial analyst checks and store data in a single spreadsheet. Another critical issue was also that, they are only able to prepare the result 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.

Hence, Snyder should implement a system in which digital databases are used, with an integrated system so everyone in the company is connected. And the financial analyst should have a cash forecasting spreadsheet that predicts cash flow for the future. The analyst should also require daily cash from each department. If these basic functions were implemented into Snyder’s financial department, they would be up to date and will run smoothly.