Dirt Bikes a Motorcycle Manufacturing Company - Case Study Example

Dirt Bikes with a New Look Technology Enabled Business (TEB) is the key to success in today’s competitive world. Management of Dirt Bikes a motorcycle manufacturing company in its new initiative to cater to the needs of employees and customers has adapted TEB services. As first step in the process of enabling technology based services, Dirt Bikes decided to connect its departments through intranet. The various advantages Intranet offers to employees are discussed here. In addition an attempt is made to discuss other Internet tools that will work in the benefit of Employees and Organization. Definition of Intranet: Intranet is an Internal Organization network that comprises of all the features of Internet with a restriction that it can be accessed only by employees of the organization (Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Laudon 2009). All software used in setting up Internet is applicable for Intranet also. Advantages for Employees from Intranets: Generally Intranet applications can be classified as: 1. Communication and collaboration applications 2. Web publishing applications 3. Business operations and management applications Communication and collaboration (wikipedia.org) can help employees to a great extent as it provides services like: e-mailing, sending faxes, voice mailing, discussion rooms, audio and video conferencing, conduction of virtual team meetings, collaborating for projects, publishing in-house blogs. Web publishing provides employees an opportunity to publish policy manuals, company newsletters, technical drawings of spares, training manuals and also telephone directories. Operations and management will be helpful for production and manufacturing department to monitor inventory and also for sales and marketing department for order processing. Issues related to setting up Intranet: Dirt Bikes has three main departments: Sales and Marketing, Human Resources and Manufacturing and Production. The departments should operate autonomously and also in coherence with other departments. Intranet is a medium through which mainly internal communication happens in the organization. For Intranet to function efficiently the database available with various departments has to be integrated at backend using Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). And standard TCP/IP protocols are used to network various communication devices. RDBMS is a system where database is maintained in form of records. The main features of RDBMS system are: 1. Entity (Tables) 2. Attributes (Columns of the table) 3. Records/Tuples (Rows of the table) Let us consider department of Human Resources, the important entity in Human resources is employee and its common attributes will be: Employee’s Identification number say (EMP_ID), Name, Age, Gender, Department, Address, Contact number, email. A sample Entity looks as follows: Employee: Emp_ID Name Age Gender Department Designation Address Contact_no Email HR_001 Susan 25 Female Human Resource Manager XYZ, city 99123456 susan@Dirt Bikes.com PR_005 Raj 35 Male Production Mechanic ABC, City 8970567 raj@Dirt Bikes.com PR_006 Raj 35 Male Production Mechanic ABC, City 6770567 raj2@Dirt Bikes.com In the above table each column is called attributes and rows are called records. Also note that there are two employees with same name working for same department they can be distinguished using Emp_ID, which is also known as primary key. Similarly we can have Product entity (table) in production and manufacturing department and customer entity in sales and marketing department. Once the backend RDBMS database is ready, standard TCP/IP protocols are used to set up the Intranet. Two Most Valuable Internet Tools for an Organization Next let us discuss two important Internet tools that act as a boon for both employees and organization: Voice over IP: Earlier Voice communications used to happen through local telephone and long distance telephone operators whose call rates were exorbitant. With the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) voice can be digitized and sent in form of packets via public Internet or Corporate networks. To make use of VoIP an end user requires a desktop computer equipped with microphone and speakers. It is estimated that VoIP reduces communication and network management costs by 20-30 percent for organizations. Important advantages offered by VoIP for an organization can be classified as: Cost Savings & Free Calls: It is an obvious advantage especially for organizations having multiple branches in different parts of the globe (mybusinessvoip.com). Single Global Number: A VoIP phone number is referred to as Virtual number, which can be shifted to any part of the globe without changing it. Portability is the biggest advantage of VoiP Integrated Communications: Basically VoIP is a package that offers multiple facilities in one magic-box, a biggest advantage for corporate employees. It offers audio and video conferencing, sending voice messages through e-mail, call forwarding and call waiting, sending fax by email and Communication with multimedia files. Second Internet tool identified is Virtual Private Network (VPN): Consider a scenario where product development team of Dirt Bikes is operating from various countries on a new product and imagine the difficulty involved in their communication without getting intercepted by competitors. One solution is to hire traditional services offered by large private-networks who provided secure private networks at huge cost. With the advent of VPN which ensures encrypted, secure private communication over a public network like Internet at a cheaper cost. Providing Wireless Environment Consider that the management of Dirt Bikes decided to provide wireless environment for its employees instead of traditional desktop mode of working. Among wireless network standards available Bluetooth, WiFi and WiMax are prominent. Bluetooth can be used to setup a Personal Area Networks within a small distance of 10 meter area. The next wireless network standards is Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) that can effectively cover distance of 10 to 30 meters. The limitation of Wi-Fi is its access points are not available in rural and remote places. Also its access points are not dense in United States. As a result WiMax developed by IEEE should be a better choice for any Organization like DirtyBikes planning to go wireless from wired networks. WiMax has access range of up to 31 miles and data transfer rates of up to 75 Mbps. WiMax will come in handy for Sales and Marketing department employees as they can plug in to cellular 3G networks and access broadband internet while in move using handheld devices. The revolution in Cellular phone and smart phones has helped employees to communicate office information from these handheld wireless devices without having to stick to their desktop machines. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks are other two important wireless technologies that can be utilized by organizations. References Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Laudon,(2009) Essentials of Management Information Systems, Eighth Edition,Published by Prentice Hall. Intranet Strategies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intranet_strategies (March 12 2007) George Knight, Advantages and Disadvantages of Voip Retrieved from http://mybusinessvoip.com/voip-advantages-disadvantages.html Read More