Preliminary Background:
1-888-JUNK-VAN
Marcus Kingo owned a fast growing waste collection business
in operation for a over a year. To reduce high fixed start up costs, the
business model was virtual with no real brick and mortar central facility. All
communication would be electronic and employees would work from home. Reducing
fixed costs allowed the business to afford competitive pricing along for the
professional services. Though the business was growing, a serious problem
existed regarding information handling. The challenge is having an affordable
IT system that met operational needs and allowed business to grow.
As the business grew, the operational complexity increased.
Buyers and Competition:
Marketing:
Operations included two call center operators, one date
clerk, three drivers, three helpers, and Kingo’s virtual supervision. Call
center operators worked in two six hour shifts taking calls by cell phone. All
order information was inputted into a custom MS Works database. The morning
operator would input all data and at the end of the shift e-mail it to the
evening operator. The evening operator would follow the same process but then
e-mail it to the data clerk. The evening operator would also create
spreadsheets that were distributed to drivers electronically for following day
work orders.
Drivers:
An accounting firm was sent the invoices and receipts for book keeping.
Information handling and inefficiencies were beginning to pile up costing money. The data clerk would often send the wrong database and incorrect jobs would be distributed. This created a lot of unhappy customers which damaged the company's reputation. Often it would take an entire day just to clean up an incorrect database error. Instead of receiving new business a lot of time was spent chasing mistakes. This happened on a more than once occasion.
A dedicated IT person to maintain and order the database would be a solution but the business wasn't large enough to handle that kind of cost. Kingo came up with 5 possible solutions to have to decide upon:
Possible Solutions:
1.
MS Access Database
2.
A Custom Application
3.
Google Docs
4.
Platform as a Service
5.
ERP
Reflection:
The Junk Van Case was presented with a more challenging design as to what to do than compared to the P&G case. The author of the P&G case wrote with a more deliberate intention as to an intended decision, where as the Junk Van Case literally left off with five possible choices.
The consultants did a great job in illustrating the company's needs. Operations were succinctly defined with the following:
Business requirements were understood:
- Reduce the number of workflow errors
- Quick Implementation
- Minimum business interruption
- Preserve virtual business model
- Finding the right IT structure for
current and future revenue streams
As a company, we have five choices to choose from:
1. MS Access Database
2. A Custom Application
3. Google Docs
4. Platform as a Service
5. ERP
The majority of us are not computer savvy as this is a smaller more hands on waste management group so the decision we would like to undertake should include that understanding. Our consulting group presented the following weighted scale with recommendations leaning towards PAAS:
Just to be safe, I did a little outside research to understand PAAS a bit more. The following are some highlights from the following article:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/paas-primer-what-platform-service-and-why-does-it-matter-212696
"All the back-end stuff about setting up servers should be done automatically and transparently in the background, and that's the promise of PaaS."
"Middleware is a software layer that offers sophisticated features to developers -- transactions,security, clustering, etc. -- so they can focus on building their custom applications instead of solving those hard problems repeatedly. But middleware is only "static" software in the sense that you still have to configure it, deploy it on servers, manage and monitor it, which was typically left to IT teams to do."
"PaaS is a superset of middleware and offers all these good middleware services to developers, in addition to covering the operational aspects that were typically owned by IT teams."
"The four big Java middleware companies are IBM, Oracle, VMware, and Red Hat, and it's very interesting to watch their PaaS strategies. They understand the market is going toward cloud, but that's not where their strength is -- it's in private data centers. These large legacy vendors are conflicted on how to protect their legacy business while also embracing the cloud."
"PaaS is an extremely strategic play, all focused on customized apps."
To reflect concurrently with the consultants I created my own table utilizing a three point weight scale to try to make a decision (albeit not as nice as the consultant team):
| MS Access | MS Access (Server) | Custom App | Google Docs | PAAS | ERP | |
| Reduce Errors | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 |
| Quick Implementation | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| Minimum Business Interruption | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Preserve Virtual Model | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Finding Right IT | 1 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Total | 9 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 9 |
After reflection, I am in agreement with the consultant team that PAAS would be the ideal candidate for implementation.
With PAAS we can have a quick implementation (3 days). This
leads to minimum business interruption. Additionally, since none of us are tech
savvy this eliminates the need to have to learn a new database implantation. We
should focus on getting new business and utilizing our strengths. Three days is
more than worthwhile than having to learn database applications. By having it
implemented for us, we can also reduce the possibility that the output is
highly flawed.
A central database can reduce the workflow errors previously
faced. The cloud concept is in line with our virtual business design.
Finally, PAAS allows us to have a no long term contracts. If
we grow at a rapid pace and need to adopt a larger different model, we have the
flexibility to do so. Equally, if the IT support isn’t what we need have the
flexibility to opt out of the contract (due to the short period) and find a
support structure that fits.
Of the choices, with the current information, it appears that PAAS is an ideal fit to what our business needs now as well as with the near future.
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