MBA MIS Class Cases

1. Many of the jobs lost in the recent "Great Recession" have been to middle managers in the baby-boomer generation (50-65). Productivity and profits at most U.S. companies have increased. Are computers to blame for these job losses? How do these changes affect you as a future manager?
2. You are running the finance department in a mid-size manufacturing company. The department is primarily responsible for investments and cash flow details. The company has almost 400 employees but the department needs only about 10. The company uses relatively standard accounting and production software, and your department has some custom programs to track portfolios and project cash flow needs. This morning, the department was shocked when the CIO and the police came in and arrested one of your employees for embezzling over $100,000. Some of the money was simply transferred from the corporate accounts to her personal account. The CIO claims that other schemes were more sophisticated and involved fake suppliers and payments to brokerage firms that do not exist. The accused employee is claiming to be innocent, and suggested that someone else used her computer to steal the money.
   1. What actions do you take now?
   2. What could be done now or could have been done earlier to reduce the chance of this problem happening?
3. Choose the IT tool that should be used as the foundation for each of the following situations and briefly explain your answer.
   1. A one-time analysis of building, labor, and transportation costs to select between three locations for a new distribution center.
   2. A small yoga center needs to track expenses for annual taxes. The company has no fixed assets and pays basic rental fees, utilities, Web costs, and a handful of similar bills each month.
   3. A new but growing manufacturer of cosmetics needs to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing through various methods, including radio, magazines, and Web sites.
   4. A soccer team needs to compile statistics on each of its players for every game. It also has video clips of players from opposing teams along with scouting commentary that will be used to help train its players to adapt to the other teams.
   5. A large company wants to manage its healthcare costs by monitoring expenses for all common procedures and then encouraging its employees to use the lower-cost, but effective providers instead of the expensive ones.
4. Select and research one feature of SAP software and explain how it could be used to increase revenue or decrease costs.
5. For each of the following business situations, identify the collaboration method you would use and briefly explain why.
   1. A finance director wants to provide information to all of her employees to keep them up to date on company and accounting-rule changes.
   2. A small company faces a new, large competitor and needs to find a new marketing strategy to compete.
   3. An engineering department needs to create chemical data sheets, update them, and make them available to all workers who use the chemicals. Many of the workers know more about the chemicals than the manager.
   4. A marketing consultant has several basic ideas for a new advertising campaign and 4-6 people in the company want to see the ideas and provide feedback.
   5. A company has just received a large government contract to develop and manage a new environmental program. It will involve a couple hundred people and take an estimated two years. The company is hoping to win similar contracts in the future.
6. You have been hired by the CEO of a start-up firm that has done very well. The firm designs components that are used in a variety of consumer products, including digital televisions, cameras, and cell phones. The manufacturing is handled by firms in Asia, including China, Indonesia, and Thailand. The firm grew rapidly, but installed an ERP system early to enable it to capture and keep all transaction data. The CEO just asked you to help with a problem. The company has five major lines of components, and the marketing, production, and finance groups are arguing over which product line is the most profitable, and will grow the most in the next couple of years. Each division has its favorite product, and the CEO has asked you to help decide the main focus for the next couple of years. What do you do? What do you need for data and information technology tools? How should the data be analyzed?
7. Your small company wants to create an application for its salespeople. The application will eventually hold data on customers, their purchases, and feedback comments. Ultimately, it could hold hundreds of gigabytes of data, but initially, it will be relatively small. The company plans to hire a company to build the application. Currently, the CEO is thinking about using FileMaker from Apple because she has heard that it can run both on Apple and PC machines. Explain why this idea makes no sense and propose a better alternative.
8. Cell phones are the current leading edge of computing. They face many of the issues demonstrated in the early years of mainframes and personal computers; including incompatible operating systems, rapidly changing hardware, issues with software availability, and the importance of image and marketing. Making the wrong decision in managing these firms can be costly. Each team should choose a cell phone company and outline a strategy for the next year. [No more than two teams can choose Apple.]
9. You are working for a company that builds large construction equipment including bulldozers, cranes, and big trucks. The company sells products around the world, and sales from the government division to military organizations constitute almost 35 percent of total sales. Although profit margins on government sales are somewhat lower, the overall size of the sales are huge and the government accounts generate a solid stream of revenue from the sale of spare parts. In fact, spare parts constitute a significant portion of the overall profits to the company, including those from private-sector sales. Although the profits are good, the spare parts cause substantial problems. Since most of the equipment remains in operation for dozens of years, the company needs to stock hundreds of thousands of parts, hold them in warehouses around the world, and be able to deliver them to any place in the world at a moment’s notice. When customers need spare parts, they are often in a hurry. But, it is difficult for the company to stock all of the parts in every location, and it often has to rely on overnight couriers to deliver parts quickly. Because some of the parts are relatively heavy, the shipping costs are high, and the company has sometimes lost money on the sale—because it is important to keep big customers happy. Some of the problems are that employees have problems finding the correct part, and some parts seem to break more often than others—but no one has yet found a specific pattern. For example, some models of dozers are hard on starters, but other models seem to break fuel pumps more often. It is expensive to stock every warehouse with every major part for every model. And when one model consistently breaks a major part, the local warehouse runs out and has to fly new ones in from other warehouses. Fortunately, the company computerized its inventory data many years ago. Workers have access to a database of ID numbers, descriptions, and prices even for equipment build in the 1970s. The common database makes it easier to call other warehouses and search for specific parts. The company has a relatively advanced IT department and has systems to handle basic accounting and HRM data and reports. How can IT help this company? What specific features need to be added? How should the features be developed?
10. Many authoritarian countries control access to the Internet, e-mail, and even cell phones. For example, the Chinese government owns all of the Internet connections. In the “Arab Spring” of 2011, several countries used their authority in an attempt to prevent “revolutionaries” from using the tools to communicate. For instance, Egypt, Syria, and Libya all forced ISPs and cell-phone providers to shut down their networks. Before dismissing these actions as common tools of dictators, consider that in the summer of 2011, British authorities faced similar calls to shut down access to rioters in London, and BART officials shut down cell phone access at some of their stations in mid-August in an alleged attempt to reduce the threat of riots (or people reporting on the number of police at the station). Now, what laws should we have in the U.S. regarding access and control of these systems? As a future manager, why should you care?

Cases are team projects.

The goal of the case is to provide a detailed, supported, intelligent answer to solve the problems posed.
You will have to work on the case outside of class and answer questions or present answers in class.