Homework 2.

Presented by: Eliana Lopez

To: Fernando Manoj

SELECTED CASE STUDIES ANALYSIS

Boo.com
● What are the 5 key lessons learned from this case study
● What is the relationship to Other Case Studies (common lessons, new lessons)
● What is this company doing now (Fast Forward: one sentence)
Lessons Learnt:

Do no increase financial burden: The non fruitful activities Boo did is one of the reasons for the
demise of the company as they undertook so many activities for advertising without considering
the cost and return of the same. Advertising work to a certain point only and they reduce
profits as most of them were employed in aggressive advertising.

Efficiency: The website launched was not at all efficient. It did not fulfil the positioning as it was
created before the launch. The back office was not efficient enough to provide what was
promised efficiently. Efficiency and creativity works hand in hand, lack of efficiency makes
creativity futile as the benefits of creativity cannot be passed on to end customer without
efficiency.

Expectations: The website failed to fulfil the expectations too. It is always paramount to deliver
what is promised or don’t make such promise. Deliver more than what is promised, it is better
to contain yourself while making promises and then provide more than what was
promised. This leads to creation og goodwill in the market.

Manage your expenses: It is very important to balance your expenses with the revenues
the firm creates. Excess expenses leads to reduced credibility of the firm in the market leading
to reduced investment opportunities in the firm which makes it difficult to raise further capital
from the market.

Branding: If you fail to deliver what was proposed, it reflects negatively on the brand on
an overall basis. It impacts not just the investors but customers too.

Common lessons learnt are the shift of focus from efficiency to rigorous marketing. This is very
common among firms as they tend to delve more into increasing the presence than ensuring the
efficiency towards product quality and customer interaction with the product.
GE Case
● What are the 5 key lessons learned from this case study
● What is the relationship to Other Case Studies (common lessons, new lessons)
● What is this company doing now (Fast Forward: one sentence)
If the company does not identify its weaknesses, others will. Each cross-functional team must
define continuous improvement plans, the final plan must be an improvement plan with
which to solve these threats. As is known, there were weaknesses in the presence on the
Internet, transactions and management of the user experience that had to be solved.
There must be a closer connection between the client and the provider. One of GE's first
responses was iCenter, an application that was installed on each of the customer's computers
and constantly collected data, also using this application the customer can ask questions about
the operation of the equipment.
Internet can take companies to the top, however if there are no results in the medium or short
term, competitors can implement similar changes and catch up by eliminating the competitive
advantage represented by the Internet.
Cloud services, web applications must cause considerable changes in the architecture of the
company, impacting on the reduction of employees, streamlining processes, performance
improvement or others. If after these changes no improvement has been reflected, it can be
predicted that there will be no clear improvement.
When each device connects to the Internet, a door is enabled to access a lot of information,
where each of the customer's devices can send usage statistics, error reports, and even today
be updated online automatically, this means that it is an obligation in today's world to
automate processes and ensure the efficiency of customer service.

GE is currently in a race to be a digital company, implements everything that the market

offers to optimize their processes, a clear example of them was the restart that made in a
power plant implementing artificial intelligence and data analysis after reading the
information from about 10 thousand sensors optimize the process of a thermoelectrica to use
more efficiently.
Umar chapter 4
● What is the main idea of the opening vignette of Chapter 4 (one sentence)
● List 5 lessons learned (one line each) from Chapter 4 (section 4.4)
● List 5 lessons learned (one line each) from Chapter 4 (section 4.5)
● Visit www.panmore.com site and review the Apple Business Analysis by using Porter’s
Five Forces Model. What are the main recommendations (2-3 sentences)
● Find 2 more case studies by visiting www.panmore.com site and explain the main
recommendations (2-3 sentences per case study)
The main idea of opening vignette is to recognize the need to understand the client, to enter
into communication with him, to propose solutions based on it, not simply to be carried away
by what one believes to be correct because what can happen later is that the client thinks that
they solved problems that did not exist in principle.
It is fundamental a business strategy to guarantee the continuity of the companies, a business
strategy has for objective to take a company to the success and to maintain it there during the
medium to long term, usually 3 to 5 years. A business strategy has not only one approach
but multiple approaches that together will help attract new customers, retain customers who
are currently in the company and thus keeps the company's course focused on success.
The IT area of a company is fundamental and must be stable or growing all the time,
proposing innovative ideas, attracting new customers with marketing strategies and sending
offers and news to existing customers so that your customers know beforehand that your
company values them and expects them to be satisfied with the service provided. On the other
hand the IT area has to be constantly improving the platforms to ensure easy access,
compatibility with multiple devices and more.
IT should be used not only for the development and optimization but for the analysis of the
company internally and externally, in order to identify the most appropriate model to follow
to align the business strategy or the next move to get to keep customers. Business strategy
reengineering is a fundamental part of surviving and prospering in a highly competitive
environment.
Value chain allows to identify exactly in which harmony the processes work in the company,
establishes a priority and at the same time demonstrates in which way each part of the process
adds value to the final product. The primary activities are considered of high value for the
product since they are the ones that take the raw materials and turn them into a product, in
addition there are administrative operations that provide the IT service that quickly are
becoming a necessity and a central axis to obtain an accelerated and constant growth.
Companies have a defined life cycle established by multiple stages, from birth, growth,
maturity, decline and death. Where it is always a good market idea to enter a growing
company, since it is constantly acquiring new customers, creating products and services.
Entering a company in decline could be a mistake surely because it does not guarantee
success in the medium or long term. However, the life cycle does not have to be linear and
depending on the business strategy and the reengineering of the processes that are carried out
in the company can be achieved from a point of decline to a new growth and rebirth ensuring
the sustainability of the company.
Umar chapter 5
● What is the main idea of the opening vignette of Chapter 5 (one sentence)
● List the case studies and also 5 lessons learned (one line each) from Chapter 5 (section
5.3 and 5.7)
● What is the main idea of the opening vignette of Chapter 6 (one sentence)
● List names of the case studies and also 5 lessons learned (one line each) from Chapter 6
(section 6.3)
● Read the “CASESTUDY5. SMART ERPs ON THE MOVE -- FEW SNIPPETS “ at the
end of this document and identify the most interesting ERP development in your case.

The main idea of opening vignette is that having an updated database with a well organized
architecture allows to have a clear vision of the business and makes it possible to automate
processes saving time and manpower.

A business application is a computer software that allows you to automate a process in a

practical way. It is considered only business application that program that is aware of the
business, such as an accounting program for inventory, an analytical system to know income
and expenditure, rebounds and new customers or a payroll program.

A company can be analyzed on a large scale by separating it into multiple business processes
(BPs), also encapsulated each in a functional area of the company, such as finance,
accounting, sales ... Etc. For each of these BPs can be designed a tool that automates the
process making it more efficient and thereby getting into larger markets because there is more
production capacity and with less time and cost.

Operational support applications are applications that work all day and at all times to support
a company, its objective is to respond to the customer's need to respond in real time to the
needs of its customers. These applications are usually registration, sales, online shopping,
shipment tracking, automated customer service and quick handling of common questions. It
is important to remember that having these systems implies always having a backup if
required, these backups can be replica servers, backups of the application code, databases
and customer information, in order to ensure high availability and robustness.

The applications can be classified by types, being the intelligent applications the type of
application most desired by the managers and owners of large companies since they are
applications that allow to observe in real time the behavior of the company, analyzing data
coming many times from hundreds of thousands of sensors, which are analyzed, segmented,
classified and shown in a simple and optimal way with a pleasant user interface.

An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is an application that allows you to automate

hundreds of thousands of small applications that were previously used to find the payroll
values to pay, inventory amounts to order or calculate revenue based on the cost of sale and
manufacture of a product of the company. Processes that before were executed by multiple
people, which can now be analyzed in real time and displayed in graphs that allow the director
of the company to quickly detect trends and make adjustments ensuring that the company is
always in an upward position towards success.
In addition, when applications apply machine learning can predict based on previous cases
in which time of year sales increase exponentially notifying automatically the need to
increase production thus achieving higher revenues with less investment.

in case study 5 "SMART ERPs ON THE MOVE -- FEW SNIPPETS " teaches us that
intelligent ERPs allow companies to automate their processes and solve small problems
before they become major, however many ERP's today are posing as intelligent when they
are not, for an ERP to be considered intelligent must learn from experience, ie it can not be
possible that the same error occurs recurrently and is not solved without the intervention of
a third party, nor can it happen that more than once is not correctly predicted the information
expected without the intervention of a third party, nor can it happen that more than once is
not correctly predicted the information expected. Intelligent ERP's are also different in
performance depending on how they analyze the available data, an ERP with weekly analysis
can extract more information from the problems than an ERP that simply analyzes the basic
text that is based.

Umar chapter 3

● Will you address business issues before technology issues (yes or no)
Yes.
● Who could be your main competitors (name one)
AWS (IoT and big Data Services).
What could be the new entrants
1. Blynk
● What could be the substitute products
1. Microsoft Azure IoT Central
2. ThingSpeak
● What will be your product strategy (new products to new customer or existing products
to new customers)
New products for new customers, focused in data analytics and machine learning.
● What will be the main Business Processes (list 10)
Main Business Process
1. Quality Process.
2. Product Development.
3. Financial Analysis.
4. Product Delivery.
5. Marketing and Sales.
 6. Human Resources.
7. Technology Management.
8. Responsibility Management.
9. Scheduling.
10. Procurement.
● What will be the most critical Business Processes (list 3)
Critical Business Process
1. Inventory
2. Shipping
3. Order Processing
● Go to the SPACE site (www.space4ict.com) and identify one game that could be of
value to this case study.
Project 2

● Does Project2 include technology considerations

● Which parts of Project1 are expanded and refined in Project2.
● How many attachments are in Project2 Description.
● Your powerpoint deliverable must have annotations and explanations. Yes/No
● You need to specify the references used and the effort (percentage contribution) of the team
members. Yes/No
● Can a team submit multiple files. Yes/No.
● Which case studies that you have reviewed in this homework will be of help in Project2
(identify only 3, with one sentence explanation for each)
● Does Project2 involve SPACE experiments

Assignment: Based on an Internet search, give a short description (one or 2 paras) to show
what is Rand McNally doing now
Rand McNally is involved in a number of businesses as of now, most of which are based
on infrastructure of internet and wireless network technologies.
The company still sells maps and navigation systems which have become more advanced;
the company offers devices which can help a customer ascertain his present location and
guide on way forward. The vehicles using such devices can also be tracked by other family
members and acquaintances that have the access to it.

Rand McNally has a product which is known as Fleet management Solutions which helps
the fleet owners track the movement of their vehicles and know their present locations.
The company publishes and sells Road Atlas, Motor Carrier's Road Atlas, Activity Books,
Travel Pictorials, Wall maps etc. These products are still purchased by people in the US.
This was Rand McNally's primary business and the company has not discarded it.
The company also sells gadgets such as high quality headphones/headsets which are used in
noisy situations such as in helicopters, Cameras, Monitoring devices, e-logs etc.
In a nutshell the company is still involved in its primary business that is selling printed
maps and they have also tried to capitalised on the internet technology and have made
customised products such as maps, navigation devices, fleet management systems which
are used by modern day drivers and fleet owners.