Management Information System in Batesville Casket Company - Case Study Example

Management Information System Abstract The current age is known as age of information technology because IT is playing a major role in every field of life. However, the effects of growing information technology can be seen in business sector. In addition, with the emergence of the information technology the business people are trying to make the overall corporate working and operational environment better by making use of modern and up-do-date techniques of information technology. However, the main intention behind the development and implementation of the modern and up-to-date techniques of information technology in the business and corporate structures is to enhance the organization’s performance and enhanced management of the business data. At the present organizations have more effective and efficient ways of the business management and handling through effective information technology implementation. The implementation of information systems has become essential for every organization that handles overall organizational business information and management process. I am performing a role of consultant for the establishment and analysis of the technology at the Batesville Casket Company. Batesville Company is Casket Company, Inc., which is the biggest manufacture of hardwood and metal burial caskets. This business is encompassing a major proportion of the U.S. marketplace intended for its produced products. In addition, the Batesville Casket provides its products to more than 16,000 funeral homes in Canada, US and Puerto Rico (Prenhall, 2009). The business of the Batesville Casket Company was running through old technology. But, the management realized the significance of new technology platforms and established new technology platforms for the PC-based customer service center. However, the new technology development has implemented with a lot of deployment delay and functioning problems. This report presents the analysis and investigation of the some of the main aspects of the Batesville Casket Company’s new technology systems. New Technology Implementation for Problems Fixation Batesville Casket Company is functioning through the old technology system for the customer service center system. These systems are early IBM PC having 8086 chip, with 10 MB hard disk. However, these technology systems were modified and enhanced with time to time but the Batesville Casket had reached the limit of potential enactments in overall structure of these systems. In addition, the hardware of these systems was expired and obsolete, thus none of the maintenance contractors was keen to carry on to servicing of hardware of these systems. However, the problem was not only with the hardware; but the software for the customer Service center systems was also so old and unable to deliver effective services. In addition, the Knowledge-Man software is the basic software that is presently running inside the corporate for the customer service center systems. Also, its present version is no longer supported by the system development vendors (Prenhall, 2009). The management has taken the decision to implement the new technology platform. The decision was taken to adopt IBM-compatible 386-based computer systems for customer service centers. These systems were having IBM PS/2 Model A16 with the memory 4 MB, a color monitor, a math coprocessor, a mouse, as well as a 160-megabyte hard disk. For the communication these systems were using the Hayes 9600 Ultra external modem. There was also printer and uninterruptible power supply for each system. The cost of whole unit was over $8,000 for each (Prenhall, 2009). The chosen operating system was not supporting the multitasking, as they simply considered IBM’s OS/2 and UNIX. For the customer service centers business decided to establish a graphical user interface system development using the Object/1 tool. This tool was supported by object-oriented programming. This technology was products of MDBS, Inc. The new technology system was aimed to enhance the performance of the business operations and management of customer service activities (Prenhall, 2009). However, the aim of all these technologies was to enhance the business performance and effective management of all the customer service operations. The main potential benefits were expected: Enhanced data security and validity Effective management of customer services operations Rapid data handling Fast communication Management control Centralized Data repository More Quality data Effective management and handling for Batesville Casket Company products Effective sales staff performance Rapid user request response Reliable network More extendibility features Fast deliver of orders and supplies information Fast processing of orders requests Enhanced monitoring of all orders and supplies Better market share Effective market position Rapid response to client orders Effective supply chain management Prominent market positions Increased customer and client confidence on business values New Technology Implementation Problems The basic problem happened with the new technology was the late deployment of the systems for the corporate functions. The technology systems were deployed in June 1992 however its planned date of deployment was December 1991. In this scenario this project extensively diverted from its planned date of implementation. Therefore, this potentially increased the cost of the project and made the difficulties for the management and development team to run the project in a better way (Prenhall, 2009). Another main problem that happened with the implementation of this technology system was adoption of the object-oriented programming tools. Because this programming paradigm was new for the developers and they spent extra time in the overall development. However, the developed system was also containing less efficient code. The main reason behind this was more lines of code per object. And there were a couple of hundred more lines of code. As a result the system processing became harder and overall processing became more difficult for the corporate information processing (Prenhall, 2009). In the development of the Object/1 tool with graphical user interface development team adopted the object-oriented programming. In this programming paradigm they were unaware of the concepts of reusability, objects and classes those could be used and called for lot of time instead of duplicated development and coding. However in case of this system development the concepts of reusability were not used effectively and they had to rewrite the code for the system again and again. Thus, a large amount of time and huge effort were spent in rewriting the code (Prenhall, 2009). In the development of the customer service centers system for the Batesville Casket Company development, they adopted the Object/1. They customized and redeveloped the overall system for the fulfillment of the corporate needs and business requirements. In this overall development the developer teams did not use the Object/1 tools for the inventory control, set of methods, and classes. These methods and classes are developed in the Object/1 and can be changed and customized to permit any organization to straightforwardly put together and develop the inventory control system to convince and fulfill corporate needs. In this way we could be able to modify and make changes to reflect the uniqueness of our business operations and operational aspects. On the other hand, in the development of customer service centers system for the Batesville Casket Company, this feature of the Object/1 was ignored and as a result the development team ad to spent long development time and extensive effort on the overall development of corporate information system and operational aspects (Prenhall, 2009). Options for action In case of development of new technology for the customer service centers system at the Batesville Casket Company we can take a lot of initiatives for the resolution of potential problems faced during the overall development of the technology. The initial suggestion I will offer is regarding the adoption of some effective development life cycle. Here the development team of the customer service centers system did not adopt any efficient development life cycle for the system development. In development of such a huge system we need to adopt an efficient development life cycle that can suit the corporate needs and operational requirements. For the development of this system, I will suggest spiral development model. It is an evolutionary software development that combines the iterative nature of prototyping by means of the systematic and controlled features of the linear sequential model. It offers the potential for speedy system development and deployment in incremental editions of software (Pressman, 2001). In this way the system could be developed in easy way. In scenario of customer service centers the development team had to rewrite the code in case of their less alignment to fulfillment of the corporate needs. However, if we adopt spiral development methodology then we don’t need to perform all these operations in a reverse fashion. Here the image of system development life cycle is given below. Figure 1- Spiral Development Image Source [ (Pressman, 2001)] and http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514266005/html/graphic66.png Another main suggestion that I want to give is regarding the use of the concepts of reusability of system code. The object oriented programming methodology was used for the development of the customer service centers system. In this case we have classes and methods those can be reused to offer better and efficient system code and less development time. Therefore, we also need less complex development, and the adoption of reusability for the code can resolve a lot of problem. Conclusion In this report I have outlined the analysis for the development and implementation of the customer service centers system for the Batesville Casket Company. In this scenario I have highlighted main problems regarding the system development. These problems include long development time, less flexible development methodology and no use of reusability of code. Here I have also suggested some effective initiatives those can improve this system. Bibliography Prenhall. (2009). Batesville Casket Company. Retrieved 02 06, 2010, from http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/5547/5681051/4e_Cases/Case_Study_I-2.pdf Pressman, R. S. (2001). Software Engineering 5th Edition. New Yoer: McGraw Hill Publishers. Sage, P., Andrew, & & Palmer, J. D. (1990). Software Systems Engineering. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Stair, R. M., & Reynolds, G. W. (2003). Principles of Information Systems, Sixth Edition. Toronto : Thomson Learning, Inc. Read More