Case Study – Tangle Corp Tangle Corp is a fictional organisation which will be used as the company for this assignment. Tangle Corp does not exist and any resemblance or similarities to any existing or previous organisations are entirely coincidental. NOTE: Some of this information may differ from that provided about Tangle in other subjects so please read it carefully and fully and do not allow assumptions or prior knowledge to interfere. Below is the background information on the company and its key personal that should be used as you wish in any portion of your assignment(s). Industry and Product Tangle Corp manufactures and sells widgets to customers throughout Asia. They have three main factories, several warehouse distribution centres and regional sales and administration offices. There are 350 staff in the company scattered around the region and they have been in business for 15 years. Brief Recent History 2011 Acquisition of a competitor's business in Perth who were making custom widgets for Australian customers. 2009 Opening of the factory in Malaysia to manufacture their most common widgets in bulk quantities at lower costs. 2008 Appointment of new CEO Alice Lien who took over from the family-based management. Family owners now a non-executive board. 2006 Opening of sales and admin offices in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. 2005 Expansion into Asia from their Australian base with the opening of a sales and admin office in Singapore. 2002 Opening of New Zealand branch including sales, admin and warehouse. Tangle has been growing slowly and mostly organically except for their purchase of a competitor in 2011. At the time this was considered a defensive decision to prevent this company from taking Tangle's market share. As a result Tangle has so far failed to capitalise on it, or even to integrate much of this business operation. The steady and organic growth pattern has meant a lack of major investment in infrastructure to support that growth. Most operational systems are merely larger and more complex versions of what they used many years ago. Company Structure The organisational structure of Tangle Corp is typical of many medium enterprise businesses. The board of directors does not get actively involved in the day to day operation, leaving most decisions to line managers and senior executives. Key personal are shown below. The first three are the executive management team, the rest are considered the line management team. Title Name Responsibility CEO Alice Lien Future vision and strategy. Alice is ultimately in charge but leaves the running the day to day business to Frank the GM. General Manager Frank Jones In charge of all business activity including profits. Very busy man. Most managers below this line report to him. CFO Helen Chen Finance and Human Resources. Helen believes that money should be earned, not spent. She has influence on all major expenses and is very conservative. Sales Manager Nick Rose Sales revenue, both new business and existing clients. Has been with Tangle for only 3 months from a rival widget maker and is keen to make an impact on revenue. IT Manager Sue Day All information technology and communication. Sue is the youngest of the senior team and a keen advocate of computing and software. Operations Manager Tom Smith Responsible for all manufacturing and service of widgets. Has been with the company since it opened (started as factory foreman). Tom is risk-adverse and favours quality and standards over profits. Logistics Joe Leow Warehousing & distribution. Joe always appears stressed and struggles to get the right widgets in stock or to the customers on time. He uses outdated systems but manages all freight services between locations. Product Manager John Button Widget design and customisation. John knows everything there is to know about widgets and how his clients use them. Plant Supervisor Ted Waters Brisbane factory manager. Ted has risen through the ranks and knows how to make his factory perform. Other factory supervisors tend to defer to Ted but they all report to Tom. Office Manager Gloria Trump Order processing and general admin. Gloria is due to retire next year. Her main objective is to make life easier for her hardworking staff. Management Organisation Chart Executive Personalities Alice Lien: as the person in charge of the business Alice spends most of her time worrying about next year's problems. Recently she has become increasingly concerned about ageing IT systems, distributed manufacturing and inefficient logistics. Frank and Helen have repeatedly complained about poor results but they disagree on which area is the most to blame. Alice is prepared to invest in some big changes, but wants to see a project plan before making her decision. Frank Jones: is the person responsible for operating profit. He sees most of the problems that the company faces and believes that IT is a constant failure, factory workers are lazy and warehouse staff are overpaid. Frank is extremely busy and rarely reads his own reports, struggles to take part in meetings, and most interaction with his team are brief and rushed discussions. Frank's management style evolved in the 90's where most staff were meant to be hard working support to those who made the real money for the company. He is not impressed by innovation, but is impressed by meeting KPIs and targets. Frank's favourite word is "later". Helen Chen; holds the purse strings like they are her last coins. Helen developed her finance skills in low margin industries where cost control was the sure path to success. Other managers privately blame her conservatism for the lack of investment in development, and making-do is her mantra. She views IT as a nasty cost centre, the factories as sunk cost that is hard to leverage, and logistics as her biggest red ink problem. Helen speaks fluent spreadsheet. Locations and Premises Tangle operates premises in several locations around Asia. A full list of their locations is below: Factory #1: Brisbane, Australia. Manufactures 30% (by volume) of Tangle's widgets and services clients in Australia and New Zealand. This is their original factory location and head office. Can manufacture most of their original widget designs. Factory #2: Perth. Makes 10% (by volume) of the products and services only existing Australian clients. This is the site of the company that Tangle acquired three years before. Only specialised widgets are made here that were part of that prior company's product lines, but these widgets are being demanded by more clients. Factory #3: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Manufactures 60% (by volume) of Tangle's widgets. Only common widgets are made here in large volumes. This factory began five years ago and services many clients throughout Asia with the most common widgets. No custom or tailored widgets can be made at this location. Warehouses: Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Wellington (NZ), Jakarta. Large Offices: Brisbane, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore. Small Offices: Perth, Jakarta, Wellington. Site Issues There are various challenges that exist which relate specifically to certain locations. • The Sydney warehouse is in a very expensive location (high rent). • The Brisbane warehouse is stretched to capacity and needs much more space, whilst all other warehouses are barely half full. • Many sites have different hours of operation and clients are often frustrated trying to reach Tangle early/late in the day for service or assistance. • The small office in Jakarta is too small and cramped for their growing team. • The Singapore office is much larger than is needed.   Sales Issues • Sales are declining in New Zealand due to delivery delays when shipping widgets there. • In Thailand sales are booming and there has been discussion about opening a small office there with permanent sales staff. Sue suggests an online sales portal instead. • Sales staff in Perth are the lowest performers with the weakest supervision. • All customer contact records are kept locally in each office making it very difficult for offices to help each other's customers. • Despite low production costs in the Malaysian factory, the high administrative overheads of the company mean that Tangle is struggling to compete on price with competitors in Asia. Production Issues • The Perth factory was built and operated by a competitor that was acquired three years ago. Only 20% of the systems and procedures have been integrated or standardised between that and the main plant in Brisbane. • The Perth factory makes some unique widgets that have growing demand in other locations. The Brisbane factory needs extensive retooling to make these so they are currently shipped from Perth. They are either slow to arrive or expensive to ship fast. These widgets could not be made in Malaysia at all. • Too many complete orders go to manufacturing just because some of the widgets are not in stock, without filling part of the order from the warehouse. • Widget customisation is increasing alarmingly as clients demand specialised products. Technology Issues • The sales admin offices have grown organically around the region and have no standard IT deployment. Hardware, software and operating systems vary from site to site. • Phone systems are disparate and it is not possible to transfer calls between sites. No automated messaging system exists except in head office. Many staff do not have phones, or even desks as they work in the factory. • There is a slow VPN data network in place with very little bandwidth usable only for the legacy EDP software. Email is sent via local internet connections. • The company web site is outdated and does not support any interaction with their internal systems or customer information.   Tangle IT Department Managed by Sue Day, the IT team at Tangle includes eight full time staff and two part time staff (who handle out of hours technical support). The company operates on an extended day from 4am to 10pm to allow for both New Zealand and Malaysian time zones to have access to IT support (hence the part time staff). Sue is highly intelligent, well-educated and respected by her team. Despite her youth she more than capable in her role, although she often struggles to influence more senior managers. What she makes up for with technical knowledge she lacks in diplomacy and relational skills. The IT staff are all suitably skilled and efficient, largely loyal and hardworking, and enjoy industry average wages and work contracts. However they are required to maintain a large collection of systems, technologies, hardware and software scattered around the company. Much of this technology is aged or even obsolete, and years of workarounds and ad-hoc repairs and maintenance have given the appearance of an effective operation. In reality things teeter on the knife edge of failure nearly every day. IT Staff The eight staff in the IT team are divided in half – four infrastructure and admin people and four support and help desk people. These two sub-teams each have a team leader. The two teams inevitably work together on many issues throughout a given day as help desk relies upon solutions and intervention from the infrastructure admin team. Help desk deal mostly with desktop related issues, exacerbated by the widely varying technical skills of their users (which ranges from nil to just enough to be dangerous). Poor user manuals or training creates repeat incidents, and at least half of all help desk issues are at least contributed to by the user. Meanwhile the admin team struggle to keep ancient software running on aged hardware by changing as little as possible to avoid their house of cards falling down. Outages of important systems typically last for hours as restoration is two parts technical and one part voodoo magic, and everyone denies that the doll with the most pins in it looks anything like the CFO… The IT staff are generally adept at fixing the regular problems that keep arising, but struggle to find time to learn new systems, ideas and methods. Internal training is minimal as apparently there is no budget for learning things that are not "core to business operations". Noone in IT is too sure what the rest of the people in Tangle really do all day, but it certainly doesn't include reading any of the important emails that IT send them each week about maintenance windows.   Tangle Manufacturing The factory warehouse teams are dedicated professionals who partly supervise an automated process, but in some cases provide manual intervention. This intervention is especially true in Perth where special widgets are made, or in any cases where customisation of widgets is done (Brisbane and Perth only). The widget expertise differs in Brisbane and Perth due to their historical origins. This is exacerbated by the fact that Brisbane machinery is made by Fjord and the Perth equipment by Holdem. Technical expertise is limited in KL to managing the automated manufacturing as no special widgets are made there. The entire KL operation runs on locally designed and built plant equipment. Around 250 of the Tangle staff work in the manufacturing areas in some way. Staff work a normal single day roster and conditions are favourable. Ted Waters has long defended his workforce and the other factories have benefited in terms of centralised policies that support happy workers. Even the KL factory operates a staff satisfaction program that would be considered above average. Recently WiFi hotspots were deployed around the factory floor so that staff can remain "socially connected" during the day. IT would like to know who installed them, and how come they are so fast… Tangle Logistics For many in Tangle this is a mysterious department filled with gnomes and pixies who no one has ever met – except that guy who drives the truck, but we cannot remember his name. Around three dozen staff handle the storage and shipping of widgets around the various countries in which Tangle operates. They range from warehouse supervisors and forklift jockeys to drivers, counters, pickers and administrators. With so few of them in the same close proximity at any one time they have learned the art of working without communicating by trusting their systems. Logistics appears to be a left over from the dark ages, an ancient beast upon whose back the lifeblood of the company seems to ride. Those who dare to gaze into its depths have the view that things are not entirely efficient in logi-land as orders are sometimes late, incomplete or in the wrong place. There is a software system used but no one except Gloria remembers what "AS/400" really means. Some managers argue that the mystery of logistics is self-serving to preserve job integrity and that an outsourcing program would reveal many of the hidden failings of the system. Joe argues that widgets are special and that they need special people to move them around. Some debate exists on Joe's definition of "special". Despite these concerns more than 97% of customer orders arrive within "policy guidelines", and deliveries count for less than 10% of all customer complaints. Logistics therefore has the best performance record in the entire company in terms of customer satisfaction – an issue that has thus far defeated all naysayers.   Core Technologies Tangle Corp operates the following core technologies in what it calls IT. • Central EDP server in head office which other branches can access via their weak VPN. Updates from sales are batched nightly and reports get run overnight to avoid slowing down the system during the day. This EDP also interfaces with stock control and inventory which the factories use to create and fill production orders. • An old CRM system is still in place and supported. Many old records and information might not be imported into the new system, and the unique historical data that operations use relies on this old system also. Also many of the factory desktop PCs are too old and slow to run new software. • Logistics runs an inventory system that was originally built as an add-on to the EDP system that predates the current old EDP system. Apparently it handles everything that Joe Leow needs. He feels that no one seems to understand how hard it is to move widgets around, and the companies he outsourced it to before seemed to fail even with all their fancy software. • The company web site runs on a state-of-the-art web server with a proxy accelerator, dedicated firewall and a fast VPN portal that no one logs into. This equipment is hosted by their Internet provider and has never failed. The web site itself was designed by the work experience kid a few years ago. Assignment Projects The following are the three possible projects you can use in your assignment. You should read the case study information about Tangle Corp before making your choice. You should use only ONE project for your entire assignment. These projects are generic and theoretical and are not intended to represent specific brands, technologies or solutions. It is recommended that you select the type of project you would be most comfortable or familiar with as this is the intention of providing you these options. Note that the assignment will not be assessing your technical knowledge of such a project, only your project management application. The activities discussed in each project represent a list of likely activities for such a project in Tangle Corp. You are welcome to expand on this, embellish or enhance the details of any activity you reasonably expect would be appropriate in such a project. Avoid getting into too much specific details about the practicalities of the project – your assignment is about your use of project management methodologies. Project resources can be defined as you see fit and may include Tangle Corp staff plus workers hired temporarily for the project, or hired permanently as a result of it. Other resources for your Gantt chart are at your discretion. Project 1 – CRM Software Deployment You plan to provide Tangle Corp with a detailed CRM software solution to centrally manage their client and sales information. Your project may include the following components: • Installation of new hardware computer systems to store the new database. • Deployment and testing of server software for the CRM core database. • Installation of improved virtual private network connections between offices to facilitate access to the central CRM database 24/7. • Migration of the daily CRM operations from the old systems to the new. • Updating or upgrading of desktop computers to handle the new software. • Transfer and migration of data records to the new system. • Creation of new policies and procedures. • Training and implementation assistance to IT staff for maintenance. • Training for users and operational staff in the use of the new system. • Creation of multi-lingual manuals for international offices. • Deployment of mobile devices for remote access the new system. • Website interface for online sales and client order management. Any other elements of this project that you wish to include may be fictional but should be realistic and feasible for such a project. Please remember that you are not being assessed on the cleverness of the project itself but on how you present its benefits to the stakeholders. Key Stakeholders In all projects the three senior executives have a role as stakeholders to some extent. Other stakeholders may apply as you see fit, but the ones below are required. General Manager – main decision maker CFO – financial stake and debt control interest. Sales Manager – user stake and project champion. IT Manager – implementation and support stake. Office Manager – user stake and workflow interest.   Project 2 – Manufacturing Plant Upgrade You intend to deploy upgraded plant equipment in their factories to enable Tangle Corp to more easily and cheaply build cutting edge widgets. This new equipment can manufacture all the widgets they currently sell and can easy create many customised variations. Your project may include the following components: • Replacement of out-dated equipment with more efficient machinery in Brisbane factory. • Standardisation of existing machinery to simplify operation and maintenance. • Re-tooling of the older equipment to meet the same standards. • Deployment of customised plant equipment in Brisbane to fulfil Perth's production requirements. • Closure of Perth factory, sale or disposal of old Perth plant equipment. • Relocation of key Perth factory staff to Brisbane. • Installation of new, modern major plant machinery at the Malaysia factory to make the most common widgets more efficiently. • Design and installation of all equipment installation and integration. • Creation of new policies and procedures. • Full training on all new equipment plus temporary workforce addition for the transition. • Phasing out and dismantling of redundant equipment in Brisbane/Malaysia. • Ongoing maintenance and support. Any other elements of this project that you wish to include may be fictional but should be realistic and feasible for such a project. Please remember that you are not being assessed on the cleverness of the project itself. Key Stakeholders In all projects the three senior executives have a role as stakeholders to some extent. Other stakeholders may apply as you see fit, but the ones below are required. General Manager – main decision maker CFO – financial stake and ROI interest. Operations Manager – efficiency stake and project champion. Product Manager – functionality and future-proofing stake. Plant Supervisor – user stake and factory staff job security interest. Project 3 – Outsourced Logistics You will provide a total logistics project to Tangle Corp to replace the majority of their current warehouse needs and all of their transport and shipping. This will allow more efficient storage and faster/cheaper distribution than the existing warehouses and trucks used by Tangle. Your project may include the following components: • ALL new shipping arrangements will need to tested. • New shared storage locations to replace existing dedicated warehouses in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Wellington. • Moving of existing goods to new warehouses. • Creating and stocking a small shared warehouse space in Singapore. • Creating a small warehouse in Tasmania with a small adjunct office area to create a local office with minimal start-up costs. • Setting up the Tasmania office, deploying initial stocks, staffing. • New bulk shipping arrangements by rail and road from the Brisbane factory to all Australian states. • Deliveries from Malaysia warehouse to use shared containers rather than waiting to fill whole containers before shipping. • Creation, adoption and testing of stronger, more secure transport storage crates for Widgets travelling long distances. • Creation of new policies and procedures. • Training and briefing of staff on new shipping and delivery timeframes. • Training and changes to manufacturing schedules due to new logistics. • Workforce transfer and retraining programs for the existing Tangle warehouse staff to limit redundancies and retrenchments. Any other elements of this project that you wish to include may be fictional but should be realistic and feasible for such a project. Please remember that you are not being assessed on the cleverness of the project itself. Key Stakeholders In all projects the three senior executives have a role as stakeholders to some extent. Other stakeholders may apply as you see fit, but the ones below are required. CEO – main decision maker CFO – financial stake and cost control interest. General Manager – profitability stake and project champion. Sales Manager – reliability stake and client satisfaction interest. Logistics Manager – user stake and transport staff job security interest.