MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 1 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. 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 Key events in the recent history of Tangle Corp are outlined below. 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 familybased 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.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 2 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 seems very stressed and struggles to get the right widgets in stock or to the customers on time. He uses outdated systems but outsources 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.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 3 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 concerned about ageing IT systems and the fact that even a comparably large IT team seems to be struggling to meet the company's demands. Frank and Helen have repeatedly complained about poor IT outcomes and how this affects profits. Alice is prepared to invest in some big changes, but does not yet know what they should be. 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. 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 IT was meant to be a 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. 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 innovation, and making-do is her mantra. She views IT as a nasty cost centre, a necessary evil whose overheads just seem to keep going up no matter how hard she hits them with a hammer. She is also puzzled why it is always her PC that seems to have network problems…MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 4 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.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 5 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.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 6 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.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 7 The ISO 20000 Imperative Here is how the whole question of this certification arose. The company once had ISO 9000 certification in its manufacturing plant, but it lapsed when they bought their competitor who was in no way compliant. Once that operation became officially part of Tangle their ISO was going to be too hard (read: expensive) to maintain. Ted Waters (main plant supervisor) still reminds everyone that at least HIS plant runs to an ISO standard. Since then Tom has begun a project to integrate the whole plant system and regain their ISO 9000 certification, partly at the urging of Alice who has learned that their major competitor is already working towards that same goal. Frank and Tom have thrown this as a challenge to IT, claiming that working to such a standard might be good for everyone. Sue decided to take this on at face value, knowing that a project to reach such standards would in fact create a lot of improvements in IT, meaning a lot of investment in IT that might not be granted without such an imperative. She also hopes it will make other management take IT more seriously. Sue has gained approval from the three executives to explore the possibility and report to them on what it would take to achieve ISO 20000 certification. The executive team all believe that this could be a viable way to break the cycle of IT negativity from both sides. The IT team greeted the news of an ISO 20000 project with a combination of groans and giggles. Apparently half thought it was madness, and the other half through it was just a joke. After hearing about Sue's cunning plan to use this project to get more funding for their team they have become more excited, and have even planned where they will put the pool table, the coffee machine and the couch when they arrive.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 8 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.  A new CRM system has just been implemented which allows all desktop staff to access centralised customer records. Sales love it, admin appreciates it, and production staff aren't sure what it is. The system is new, shiny, fast and stable – despite running over the Internet since the VPN is too small.  The old CRM system is still in place and supported. Many old records and information could not be imported into the new system, and the unique historical data that operations use has not yet been set up in the new one. Also many of the factory desktop PCs are too old and slow to run the new software and so it was decided they could keep using the old one for now.  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 and apparently his handful of warehouse managers prefer to deal with paper anyway. He feels that no one seems to understand how hard it is to move widgets around, and the companies he outsources it to all seem to fail even with all their fancy software so…  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. IT Customer Groups There are several departments who each have their own demands on the IT services. These are outlined below:  Sales; this team relies upon both CRM systems and email. They all have desktop PCs but now many have begun to use their own mobile device to reach email. Someone in head office sales is a closet geek and they have installed remote desktop software which can be accessed via tablets through the internet. This allows sales staff to remotely control their desktop to access internal systems such as CRM and even EDP systems. This contagion is spreading to other branches and Sue is not yet sure who the villain is. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, sales generate a lot of help desk demand.  Admin; hell hath no fury like a CFO who cannot access her reports and the EDP itself is rarely stable. Gloria and her team of administrators are so accustomed to outages they get all sad when they have to put in a full day's work at the desk. "Break" time for them has two meanings and they are a very patient lot when things fall over as their desks are adjacent to the staff cafe.MGI515 Case Study Document – Main Assignment MGI515_201490 Page 9 Sue has tried to run training for the admin staff on how to avoid causing system faults but Gloria assures her that they are quite familiar with the system as they have been using it since Sue was in high school...  Operations; factories are dusty places and apparently only PCs built back in 2005 were designed to handle the environment. Their operating system is no longer supported by Microsoft but since the IT team keep managing to fix them all the time Ted isn't really interested in spending money to replace them. Apparently IT budget in this area falls under "plant equipment" so it gets changed about as often as the assembly line does. The factory only uses the EDP system to receive and confirm orders and they are not considered techsavvy. However they have by themselves installed several WiFi nodes on the factory floor so their phones can access Facebook during the breaks.  Logistics; Joe is not a believer in technology and claims he doesn't want a phone which might be smarter than him. Boxes get moved by muscle and effort and he sure has a lot of boxes to move, and to find when they get lost. Warehouse team members access the EDP system to track orders and they use email to communicate but Joe doesn't want to replace his warehouse software any more than he wants to replace his phone.