You have been hired by Highlanders-R-Us as an MIS department associate to work on a project to improve information systems. You have been assigned to a small team for the duration of the project. Your performance will be assessed on the basis of both individual and group contributions.
Highlanders-R-Us was once the leading retailer of stuffed animals and the exclusive distributor of Scottish bears, but has suffered a number of issues in the past decade:
- A private equity buyout resulted in the company being saddled with debt
- Information Systems are outdated
-Accounting is on an unsupported version of Oracle software that costs $15 million a year and is not interoperable with modern platforms.
-Human Resources uses manual, paper-driven processes. A former employee has sued the company for discrimination in the amount of $10 million. An HR Information System could have avoided this. - Supply chain management uses an unsupported version of SAP software that costs $10 million a year and is not interoperable with modern platforms.
- The company has two data centers that cost $25 million a year to operate. These would be unnecessary if cloud-based platforms were used.
- 25% of the Information Systems staff (cost for these staff is $10 million a year) is supporting the above data centers and antiquated software, but lack the skills for modern systems.
- The company has failed to move into eCommerce and the existing website is stuck in the 1990’s: https://web.archive.org/web/19961228165316/http://www.toysrus.com/
- The company has no social media presence
- Sales have dropped from $5 Billion annually in 2015 to $900 Million annually in 2019
Information Systems costs have remained consistent at $100 Million annually – increasing from 2% as a percentage of revenue to 11% as a percentage of revenue.
You may choose any of the above items to discuss. There is no minimum number of items above that you must select, but whatever you choose must be discussed in sufficient detail to convince your management to move forward with your recommendations. For most students, I estimate that this will be approximately 10 pages (excluding the Appendix), but if you write well it may be less and if you are weak in writing, then it may be more.
Regardless of the problem selected above, you must fully analyze and discuss the business problems in detail, compile detailed recommendations, and then discuss how you would propose implementing your recommendations. If you are like most students who have not dealt with these types of problems previously, you should conduct independent research to see how other companies have addressed these types of challenges.