Management: Information Systems 410 CHS 9-12
3) You have been hired by Croydon Visiting Nurse Services, whose business processes are all manual, paper-based processes. How might a CRM system benefit them?
A CRM system that includes patients' health records would allow any nurse to take over if another needed replacement. Assuming that the nurses had access via laptops or other PDAs to the system, a new nurse would have instant access to the patients' needs. The CRM might also be able to record which types of treatments or products customers were most interested in or gave the greatest benefit to customers, and help anticipate needs. Additionally, with PRM capabilities, products needed by the nursing service would be more easily anticipated, ordered, and delivered. Since the employees work in the field, or away from a central office, Internet-based communications might provide tools for reviewing employee performance
13) What methods could a portal use to generate revenue? Which do you think might be most successful, and why?
Advertising, subscriptions, selling collected marketing information, and directing buyers to sellers could all generate revenue. Student evaluations will vary. A sample answer is: I would think the most successful method would be through collecting marketing information, because as a portal that links to large amounts of external information and attracts repeat customers, the portal would have the opportunity to gather a lot of information about each user.
6) You have been hired by Santori, Inc., a small company that imports and distributes an Italian sparkling water. The company is interested in what benefits an enterprise system would bring. Would an enterprise system be appropriate for this company? What steps would you take in determining this?
An enterprise system may be too expensive, although there are enterprise software packages that are available to smaller companies. A hosted enterprise application might be the most economical way to implement an enterprise system. To determine whether this would be beneficial to Santori, I would first look at their existing business processes. It would be ideal to determine if their efficiency meets benchmarks in their industry and allows them to be competitive with other businesses in their niche. Then I would review existing hosted applications to see how the applications business processes matched up with Santori's. It would be important to compare the costs of instituting new business processes with the benefits and cost savings
2) Identify five benefits of customer relationship management systems.
Benefits include: better customer service, make call centers more efficient, cross-sell products more effectively, help sales staff close deals faster, simplify marketing and sales processes, acquire new profitable customers, sell additional products and services, provide customer information for developing new products, increase product utilization, reduce sales and marketing costs, identify and retain profitable customers, optimize service delivery costs, retain high-lifetime value customers, improve customer loyalty, improve response rates to direct mail, increase product profitability, respond quickly to market opportunities
12) List and describe the three main categories of electronic commerce. Which do you think is ultimately the most valuable to the individual consumer? Support your answer.
Business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and consumer-to-consumer. All three are valuable to the consumer, but in the long run, business-to-business may be the most valuable to the individual consumer because it will reduce prices and increase both goods and services. (Other opinions, of course, are supportable.)
20) What is the business value of a DSS?
DSS can help companies improve supply chain management and customer relationship management. Some take advantage of the company-wide data provided by enterprise systems. DSS today can also harness the interactive capabilities of the Web to provide decision-support tools to both employees and customers
4) Identify and describe three major enterprise applications.
Enterprise systems, customer relationship management, and supply chain management are three enterprise applications. Enterprise systems are based on a suite of integrated software modules and a common central database. Enterprise systems utilize enterprise software to support financial and accounting, human resources, manufacturing and production, and sales and marketing processes. Enterprise systems provide many benefits including an enterprise-enabled organization, improved management reporting and decision making, a unified information systems technology platform, and more efficient operations and customer-driven business processes. Supply chain management systems help an organization better manage its supply chain, including planning, sourcing, making, delivering, and returning items. Supply chain management software can be categorized as a supply chain planning system or as a supply chain execution system. A supply chain planning system enables a firm to generate demand forecasts for a product and to develop sourcing and manufacturing plans for that product. A supply chain execution system manages the flow of products through distribution centers and warehouses to ensure that products are delivered to the right locations in the most efficient manner. Supply chain management benefits include improved customer service and responsiveness, cost reduction, and cash utilization. Customer relationship management systems help firms maximize the benefits of their customer assets. These systems capture and consolidate data from all over the organization and then distribute the results to various systems and customer touch points across the enterprise. Customer relationship management systems can be classified as operational or as analytical.
5) Identify at least four benefits and four challenges of enterprise systems.
Enterprise systems, customer relationship management, and supply chain management are three enterprise applications. Enterprise systems are based on a suite of integrated software modules and a common central database. Enterprise systems utilize enterprise software to support financial and accounting, human resources, manufacturing and production, and sales and marketing processes. Enterprise systems provide many benefits including an enterprise-enabled organization, improved management reporting and decision making, a unified information systems technology platform, and more efficient operations and customer-driven business processes. Supply chain management systems help an organization better manage its supply chain, including planning, sourcing, making, delivering, and returning items. Supply chain management software can be categorized as a supply chain planning system or as a supply chain execution system. A supply chain planning system enables a firm to generate demand forecasts for a product and to develop sourcing and manufacturing plans for that product. A supply chain execution system manages the flow of products through distribution centers and warehouses to ensure that products are delivered to the right locations in the most efficient manner. Supply chain management benefits include improved customer service and responsiveness, cost reduction, and cash utilization. Customer relationship management systems help firms maximize the benefits of their customer assets. These systems capture and consolidate data from all over the organization and then distribute the results to various systems and customer touch points across the enterprise. Customer relationship management systems can be classified as operational or as analytical. Operational CRM refers to customer-facing applications, such as sales force automation, call center and customer service support, and marketing automation. Analytical CRM refers to customer relationship management applications dealing with the analysis of customer data to provide information for improving business performance. Benefits include increased customer satisfaction, reduced direct marketing costs, more effective marketing, and lower costs for customer acquisition and retention
18) What is a GIS? Describe at least three ways in which a GIS could be used by modern business.
Geographic information systems are a special category of DSS that use data visualization technology to analyze and display data for planning and decision making in the form of digitized maps. GIS can best be used to support decisions that require knowledge about the geographic distribution of people or other resources in scientific research, resource management, and development planning. GIS have modeling capabilities, allowing managers to change data and automatically revise business scenarios to find better solutions. For instance, a company could display its customers on a map and then design the most efficient delivery route for its products. A second way in which it could be used would be to analyze demographic information to decide where to open branch restaurants. A third use could be customer demographic data and map information to locate people who are likely to become customers for the company's services.
8) What additional complexities are faced in global supply chains? How does the Internet help in managing global supply chains?
Global supply chains typically span greater geographic distances and time differences than domestic supply chains and have participants from a number of different countries. Although the purchase price of many goods might be lower abroad, there are often additional costs for transportation, inventory, and local taxes or fees. Performance standards may vary from region to region or from nation to nation. Supply chain management may need to reflect foreign government regulations and cultural differences. All of these factors impact how a company takes orders, plans distribution, organizes warehousing, and manages inbound and outbound logistics throughout the global markets it services. The Internet helps companies manage many aspects of their global supply chains, including sourcing, transportation, communications, and international finance. As goods are being sourced, produced, and shipped, communication is required among retailers, manufacturers, contractors, agents, and logistics providers. With Internet technology, supply chain members communicate through a Web-based system. Firms use intranets to improve coordination among their internal supply chain processes, and they use extranets to coordinate supply chain processes shared with their business partners
15) Describe the use of personalization and customization in e-commerce. What business value do these techniques have?
In personalization, merchants can target their marketing messages to specific individuals by adjusting the message to a person's name, interests, and past purchases. For example, Amazon.com greets each logged in user with their user name. With customization, merchants can change the delivered product or service based on a user's preferences or prior behavior. The Wall Street Journal Online allows you to select the type of news stories you want to see first and gives you the opportunity to be alerted when certain events happen. The ability of Internet technology to track customer behavior at Web sites, along with records of purchases and other behavior, allows merchants to create a detailed profile of a customer. These profiles can be used to create unique personalized Web pages that display content or ads for products or services of special interest to each user, improving the customer's experience and creating additional value. The business value of personalization is reduced marketing costs, as you spend only the money to target customers that are more likely to be receptive and are more profitable, and improved sales results, from increased customer response to personalized sites that better serve their own purposes and shopping needs. Personalization can achieve some of the benefits of using individual salespeople for dramatically lower costs
11) List and describe at least five different Internet business models. Which of these models do you think would be the most risky for a startup business today? Support your answer.
Internet business models include: e -tailer, transaction broker, market creator, content provider, community provider, portal and service. The choice of riskiest model will depend on the individual student. A sample answer is: Today the riskiest model would be a content-provider, because most, if not all, of the major offline entertainment and content producers such as television networks and newspapers are online. They would be your competitors, and already have the means for content creation and distribution in place. All of the other business models do not have the risk of creating brand new content
21) Describe MIS and DSS and differentiate between them.
MIS provide information on the firm's performance to help managers monitor and control the business. They typically produce hard copy, fixed, regularly scheduled reports based on data extracted and summarized from the organization's underlying transaction processing systems. DSS provide new sets of capabilities for nonroutine decisions and user control. MIS accents reports based on routine flows of data and assists in the general control of the organization. DSS emphasizes change, flexibility, and rapid response to unstructured problems
1) Identify and describe the two types of customer relationship management applications.
Operational CRM and analytical CRM are two types of CRM. Operational CRM refers to customer-facing applications, such as sales force automation, call center and customer service support, and marketing automation. Analytical CRM refers to customer relationship management applications dealing with the analysis of customer data to provide information for improving business performance
16) A key business decision in your sporting goods manufacturing company is determining what suppliers to use for your raw materials. How can you determine if a manager in charge of selecting suppliers is making the best choice?
Student answers will vary but should include an understanding of evaluating the information the data is based on. For example: One way to determine the manager's choice is to find out what he or she is basing their decision on: price, quality, schedule, relationship, etc. Then you could find out how those measurements of the supplier qualities are madeis the data about the suppliers accurate information. You could evaluate the data informing the decision along the information quality dimensions: accuracy, integrity, consistency, completeness, validity, timeliness, and accessibility.
19) Explain why even well-designed information systems do not always help improve a firm's decision making.
Student answers will vary but should include the three main reasons for information systems not always producing positive results: 1. information quality, 2. management filters, and 3. organizational inertia/politics. A sample answer is: There are three main reasons that implementing a well-designed information system might not result in better decisions. First, the information produced by a system may be incomplete and inaccurate. The quality of information will depend on the quality of data gathered, and may require a minimum amount of data to be gathered. Inaccurate data and incomplete data can degrade the quality of decision making. Second, management filters can also stymie good decision makinga manager who has a bias against some types of activities or solutions, or is overly optimistic or pessimistic will make decisions that are skewed towards their own perspective rather than actual facts. Finally, organizational inertia and politics can hamper decision making. Information systems can require organizational change in roles and business processes that employees want to resist; or a system can produce information that suggests that a change is necessary but employees ignore in order to maintain the status quo in roles and responsibilities.
14) You are consulting for Lucky's, a chain of gas stations. What types of e-commerce opportunities, if any, are relevant to Lucky's? Could Lucky's make use of any Internet business models for this opportunity?
Student answers will vary. A sample answer is: In terms of B2B e-commerce, Lucky's might be able to procure goods over the Internet, use a private industrial network to coordinate their supply chain with suppliers and manage inventory. Depending on the structure of the gasoline retail business, industry net marketplaces and exchanges might be of use. In terms of B2C e -commerce, there are not many opportunities, as it is inefficient to sell gasoline over the Internet. Lucky's could make sure that its stations are listed in popular location-based mobile services that help drivers find nearby gas stations.
10) "Knowledge increases exponentially" is a phrase with which we are all familiar. How does this concept apply to electronic business and the emergence of the digital firm? Support your contentions.
Student answers will vary. A sample answer is: The exponential increases of knowledge refer to shared information. For example, once the concept of a wheel is established, inheritors of that knowledge do not have to "reinvent the wheel." The Internet is a tool similar to the wheel: it is based on shared standards and universal tools. The Internet and shared networking technologies are allowing new techniques for attracting customers and selling customers to be developed and adapted very quickly. For example, although early Internet retailers had difficulty setting up secure credit card transactions and payment systems, today there are many systems in place as vendors step in to create shared tools for doing this. The Internet is fostering shared knowledge and, as such, propagating ever greater increases in that knowledge.
9) What is the most profound way in which e-commerce and the Internet have changed the relationship between companies and their customers? Support your answer.
Student answers will vary. A sample answer is: The most profound way in which e -commerce and the Internet have changed this relationship is in the shrinking of information asymmetry. An information asymmetry exists when one party in a transaction has more information that is important for the transaction than the other party. That information helps determine their relative bargaining power. In digital markets, consumers and suppliers can "see" the prices being charged for goods, and in that sense digital markets are said to be more "transparent" than traditional markets. For example, until auto retailing sites appeared on the Web, there was a pronounced information asymmetry between auto dealers and customers. Only the auto dealers knew the manufacturers' prices, and it was difficult for consumers to shop around for the best price. Auto dealers' profit margins depended on this asymmetry of information. Today's consumers have access to a legion of Web sites providing competitive pricing information, and three-fourths of U.S. auto buyers use the Internet to shop around for the best deal. Thus, the Web has reduced the information asymmetry surrounding an auto purchase. The Internet has also helped businesses seeking to purchase from other businesses reduce information asymmetries and locate better prices and terms
7) Identify two classifications for supply chain software. For each classification, identify five capabilities.
Supply chain planning systems and supply chain execution systems are two classifications for supply chain software. Supply chain planning systems enable a firm to generate demand forecasts for a product and develop sourcing and manufacturing plans for that product. Capabilities include order planning, advanced scheduling and manufacturing planning, demand planning, distribution planning, and transportation planning. Supply chain execution systems manage the flow of products through distribution centers and warehouses to ensure that products are delivered to the right locations. Capabilities include order commitments, final production, replenishment, distribution management, and reverse distribution
17) Describe the balanced scorecard model and its role in ESS.
The balanced score card is a framework for operationalizing a firm's strategic plan by focusing on measurable outcomes on four dimensions of firm performance: financial, business process, customer, and learning and growth. Performance on each dimension is measured using key performance indicators (KPIs), which are the measures proposed by senior management for understanding how well the firm is performing along any given dimension. The balanced scorecard framework is thought to be "balanced" because it causes managers to focus on more than just financial performance. In this view, financial performance is past historythe result of past actionsand managers should focus on the things they are able to influence today, such as business process efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee training.
