Case study Questions - Essay Example

The Development of Terra Firma Terra firma is a medical company that produces medical tools. These medical tools include x-ray machines and computer tomography scanners. Some of the companies that were great customers and recommended customers of this products and services were General Electric, Phillips, Siemens, Hitachi, and Toshiba. These companies then integrate these products into their own imaging systems that were sold to hospitals, outpatient-imaging clinics, doctors’ offices, and research laboratories worldwide.

The company of late has produced a line of filmless dental and vetinary x-ray systems that were sold to their global network.Terra Firma gained a good reputation for providing some of the leading medical technology equipment in the world. The good reputation helped to increase their goodwill value of these firms. Another way that these customers benefitted was from the increasing profits due to high level of demand of their products. This was because of the efficiency that they got from Terra Firmas products.

The products also used some little time to scan and get the results. In addition, they were cost effective. Beneficiaries such as patients who required some x rays paid little money for the services that used little time. Terra Firma is facing challenges in order to stay put in the market. Just as the firm perceived its operation to be ongoing in the right direction, it has faced a number of challenges. One thing that the company has realized is that the router nose-dives once it is overfed with connection request packets, which prompts a chain of response that has led to botch of both primary and secondary network switches in the main data center.

Another challenge that Terra Firma is facing in order to stay put in the market is the challenge of testing its products. Since its shift to medical software development, the company has been experiencing this challenge. This is because it requires people to be tested therefore, providing a bigger challenge to the firm. The other challenge is bringing back online the missing log files, corrupted database tables, and inconsistent application data. These challenges requires weeks of dreary effort and execution of manual recovery procedures.

One of the goals of the company is to have a worldwide reach in order to gain a large market share. The strategy Terra Firma has put forth is to open as many branches as it could in order to gain the global reach. As a result, Terra Firma has opened branches in countries such as US, UK, japan, Germany, Australia and Singapore. Terra firma also collaborated with other companies in order to gain this global reach. This can be evidenced from its collaboration with Intel Company in Penang, Malaysia.

Terra Firma also brought in outside investors to help in this growth of the company. This mainly involved New Zealand wealthy class of investors such as the owner of the largest sheep farm in that country. Consequently, these investors advocated for the recruitment of a professional management team. The owners of this company, the Frost Brothers, insisted on retaining their positions as CEO’s. They later agreed to hire Stephanie Clark as the Vice President of the company who brought in the information technology department in 2003.

The information technology department at terra firm has revolutionized since Clark came in. This has seen the department scoop a whooping NZ$150 million in the companies’ budget, an area that was never before. The IT department is responsible for development and maintenance of software used by Terra Firma and sold to medical practitioners and other electronic companies.Balanced scorecard for Terra FirmaFinancialsTo succeed financially, we must aim at making profit.Objective; achieve global outreachMeasure; attain low risksTarget; all hospital equipmentInitiatives; perfection of medical care worldwideReferencesSMU. (2011). Terra Firma Medical Systems (A).

Singapore Management University. 1.01 A4.