Case Study II

BestLine Hardware

In spring of last year, BestLine Hardware undertook an ambitious program to overhaul their supply chain. In early planning, BestLine predicted that they could save over 25% of their entire supply chain costs by streamlining and optimizing their practices.

One of the areas that had the most promise for savings and efficiency was that of order communication and fulfillment. In the existing system, Bestline’s inventory management department triggered a request to the ordering department. The ordering department then created an order and faxed it out to one of their suppliers. The supplier marked down on the fax what could be fulfilled against the order and would fax it back to BestLine for processing.

Over time, this fax-based system proved to be inefficient and error-prone. Faxes were often lost or garbled, and hand-written comments could be very difficult to interpret accurately. As a part of their supply-chain efficiency effort, BestLine decided that they would try to modernize their ordering and fulfillment system by creating an Internet-based system. BestLine believed that the Internet solution would improve the speed, reliability, and accuracy of order placement.

A project was commissioned, and Sarah Davis, a senior project manager, was assigned to the effort. Immediately, Sarah went about analyzing the project, understanding the reasons it had been undertaken. She identified the needs and the stakeholders for each need, and she properly identified the project’s constraints.

As Sarah began to gather the requirements, however, she started experiencing difficulty with the project.

Members of senior management expressed a strong idea about the scope of the project, but the Information Technology department had a thorough set of technical requirements that did not completely fit senior management’s goals. Additionally, the supplier-relations group commissioned a focus group of suppliers and insisted that this group be allowed to give input on the project.

Ultimately, Sarah elected to try and involve as many of the stakeholders as possible. She and her lead Business Analyst set up a series of ninety minute one-on-one expert interviews with the stakeholders. They gathered nearly two hundred pages of documentation as a result of these meetings, and from there, Sarah and the analyst worked to create usability scenarios that represented all of the requirements she had captured.

The focus group continued to be involved in the process, and in general they were pleased with what they saw. When the requirements were presented to the ordering department for sign off, however, the manager of the ordering department complained that he had not been adequately involved and that the documented requirements were nearly impossible for a non-technical person to understand. Sarah stated that the requirements had been thoroughly analyzed and pointed out the ordering department had been given the opportunity to be involved. She also noted that two department members had been interviewed, and she stressed that any delay on the signature at this point would almost certainly delay the project.

Ultimately, the manager of the ordering department signed off on the requirements, even though he did not feel comfortable with his understanding of the material. Sarah and her team then began designing the new system.

Questions:

1. Should BestLine’s ordering department have been more involved during the project?

2. Sarah used expert interviews for this project. Were there more effective methods for gathering the requirements?

3. What crucial step(s) did Sarah skip in the requirements process?

4. Which downstream activities would likely be affected by her approach? At what point in the project would the problems likely emerge?

5. Should Sarah have presented the requirements to the ordering manager at this point? Should the ordering manager have signed off on them?

Obviously, Jim Lavoie and Joe Marino have little confidence in the chain of command principle as a means of fostering success in today’s business world. Explain why. How would Lavoie and Marino respond to the criticism that, under their system, “the buck doesn’t stop anywhere in particular’?

2. Says Jim Lavoie: “Being acknowledged as part of an organization’s future is all it takes for an employee to grow deeper roots in it.” First of all, explain what Lavoie means. Then consider the following questions: Do you basically agree or disagree with Lavoie? Do you think that it’s important to “grow roots” in an organization that you Work for? What might it take for you to feel that you’re ‘part of an organization’s future”—that it’s worth it to sink “deeper roots”? What other factors might be important to you in feeling that you’re something more than a mere cog in some organizational machine?