Elegant Kitchenware (EK) began as a manufacturer of cooking pots. It is now a mid-sized company with 50 managers and 250 employees. Jennie Cole is the Chief Executive officer and founder. The annual income of EK is currently $2 million. Its profits fall between 18-20% of revenues each year. Over time, the company has expanded into other areas that the leadership team believed was relevant to their strategy. Their strategy was to become the top kitchenware company for families and for people who have a passion for cooking. However, the company has a few issues to resolve.

Back-end Technology Infrastructure:

EK had seven key departments: accounting, finance, sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, and inventory management. Everybody seems happy with the technology infrastructure. There were three local area networks. The functional accounting software and finance software were located on a server that was on the fourth floor of a high rise building. They both shared an Oracle database, and a Linux operating system. The functional marketing software and sales software were located on a server that was on the third floor of a high rise building. They both shared an Oracle database, and a Linux operating system. The functional manufacturing, purchasing and inventory management software were located on a third network (network 3). Network 3 was located outside a metro area about 40 minutes away from the head office. All the three software both shared a cross-functional Oracle database, and an IBM operating system. The company had about 20 workers in the IT department. They maintained all the software and hardware. The CEO was interested in modernizing the current software and hardware infrastructure. However, given that these back-end technologies were critical to the operations of the company, she was not willing to outsource any of it to a data center.

Vendor Connection Infrastructure:

EK has had a strong connection with two vendors (Karim Inc. and Steel Company) for over ten years. The vendors were located close to the manufacturing plant of EK. The closeness of the two vendor’s locations, 5 minutes’ drive, had been very helpful. This has made the exchange of business documents very easy. The employees of both companies just drove by and dropped the invoices, orders and delivery slips to the warehouse. The warehouse then scanned the documents and sent them by email to the accounting department for further processing. EK just expanded its vendor network to seven. The new vendors all have ERP systems for manufacturing and inventory management. Most of them are located about 1-2 hours away from EK’s manufacturing plant. Before the new vendors signed on as vendors, they promised that they would create a local office near the manufacturing department. That way, they would be able to personally pickup/drop-off orders and invoices to EK’s manufacturing site. The average cost to manually process a document was approximately $45. Invoices and other documents are expected to climb to 500 per month. The cost of reconciling an error due to manual processing was about $170 per event. The error in the current system was about 10-15% of the business document volume per month.

E-Commerce Infrastructure:

The E-commerce of EK was a pain point. The income from their website was about 1% of all revenues. The company made some inroads by creating a storefront on Amazon, but it really has not worked well. The CEO believed that the company would increase its sales if more people bought the pots from its own website instead of on Amazon. Currently, the company had one server that was used for its e-commerce. The web site was maintained by Billy, who worked at the warehouse. Maintenance of the website was not Billy’s main job though. The website had about 200 web pages. Most of the pages provided customers with pictures and videos about different kinds of pots that the company sold. The website was really well designed, so that was not the issue. The website domain name was called buyyourpots.com. When you enter the name in a browser, you will come to a very nice home page, that welcomed the visitor. The visitor could then click the navigation menus for different kinds of pots, general information, cooking events and so on. If you click on pots, it will show you a table with twelve pots and you can click on the hyperlink that was associated with any of the pots to learn more about it. When you are ready to buy, you just click on PayPal link and you can process your purchase via PayPal. There were a few things that the CEO wanted to accomplish. She really wanted to gather more data about customers. Also, she wanted to find a way to ensure that more people can be on the website without it slowing down to a crawl. At the current state, if 150 customers get on the site everything slows down, it seems as if the website had crashed. Also, in the existing setup, it was not possible to track inventory that was being sold online and send such data to the functional inventory management software. One possibility that they were looking at doing was to buy one new server hardware to replace the one that they have. The new one would have a larger secondary hard drive and a larger primary storage (it would double the current RAM capacity from 32GB to 64 GB). Then, one EK staff would copy the 200 pages to the new machine. The server would have its own webserver software and save information on a solid state drive. Do you think that this e-commerce architecture could be improved?

Decision Making Technologies:

Decision making was complicated at EK. This was how it worked. Once a week or once every two weeks, a staff from sales, marketing, inventory management, manufacturing, finance and accounting generated weekly or monthly aggregated reports from each functional software, The report analyst then sent digital reports to all the mid-level, senior and high level executives for their use. Each executive had a “private” routine for extracting data from her/his report. Each executive used the data during the monthly operations meetings and for the quarterly strategy meetings. Excel spreadsheets played a central role in this process. There were all kinds of issues with accuracy of the data and the amount of staff, effort and time this process consumed. There was no methodology to store all the data in one place. How could the organization create a context in which the organization truly comes closer to the WKID hierarchy? The CEO wants to maintain this capability in the company too. The CEO said the following:

“I would like to have modern technologies for our backend processes, to adopt e-commerce technologies and other tools for creating insights. We would like to host these ourselves!”