Craven Books Case Study Solutions

One day, we were making money, the next, everything was falling apart But can the case be so easily closed ? A quick look on the history of the firm and its failure should help us define the culprit(s). In the asses, the company was at the peak to it success and was looking to expand , to do 50, it was decided the company should have an efficient distribution system, and that’s why the management team opted to create an IT system.

However, the system did not work as expected for Craven Books, and sales started dropping.

One of the first reasons for the failure of the system is the fact that Craven Books management, unable to determine the best IT system to use, and to draw a strategic planning, rushed into choosing the first system that seemed fit to the company _ Rapid efficiency and competitiveness appear to have prevailed in their choice of the system. Moreover, nobody was really designated to handle the project, see to its success, and to be held accountable in case of failure.

The fault can also lie with the IT consultants on whom management relied too much, and the supplied Who provided the IT system. Not only did they not assess the system and its education to Craven Books – in terms of efficiency and effectiveness -? they also focused on charging the company rather than fixing the issues Craven Books was facing, and helping them improve the system. However, management should have known not too trust consultants too much, and to decide cautiously.

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Employees can finally also be partly blamed for the failure of the system.

Issues with the IT System and Consequences

Though the system was new and somehow hard to handle, employees did not try to understand it and remained passive, complaining without pointing at real issues. . Describe the project decision making process. What are the events which led to the decision to go ahead with the implementation of the software? What was the final “key event” which made the system fail? Peter Cravens company enjoyed a rapid growth in the seventies, after its decision to enter the comic books business. Therefore, the number to customers increased, making the existing classification system less efficient as before.

Peter Craven then decided to adopt a new strategy to face this issue: computerizing seemed to be the best solution, as avail companies had already adopted a similar IT system. The decision was taken very quickly, without asking either the management team or the employees how they were feeling about such a change, or setting clear goals. However, to help With the decision-making process, they referred to consultants Who strongly believed the change would benefit the company. Yet, shortly after the decision, the company encountered a few problems.

They had forgotten to consider some important steps of the change, such as calculating the cost of computerizing, r strategically planning this change. In the decision-making process, decisions were made way too quickly, leading to unclear objectives. And employees being left out. Even after the system had been implemented, further decisions lacked direction or clarity, as leaders had lost common sense. The major final key event which led to the failure of the system was most probably the growing numbers of clients, ordering books. Indeed, with a much faster system, deliveries would also speed up.

But with the reduction of the number of employees, and the major peepholes in the system, mistakes were made, books placed at some other place than it was supposed to be : stocks started increasing instead to decreasing, and wrong deliveries were often made. 3. Draw the storehouse management process before and after introducing the new software Bettor introducing the new software, the order process of the old system was individual. It means that after receiving the order of a customer, employees had to walk around the storehouse to gather the different items required by a customer, pack them and then proceed to the delivery.

With the new software, the order process avgas in batches orders were systematically processed. This ‘state of the art fully integrated system’ was supposed to be time and cost efficient, and save a lot of efforts. It was working as following Orders were Sent directly to a Computer that would provide a list of items needed for the given day to the employees. Employees would then collect the books and magazines listed, pack them up and distribute the order. The new system allowed for all activities to be organized together, via a computer.