1. Describe the main problem/ issue related to Information systems in this case ?

2. Among IS strategic objectives discussed in chapter one, which objectives the company is trying to achieve and enhance ? Support your answer

3. Describe the main management, organization, and technology dimensions/issues in this case? What solutions were made to address these dimensions

4. Based on generic strategies in chapter three, what strategy does the company use to compete? Suggest a new strategy to this business in order to compete and become the no one in the industry

5. Identify one main issue related to IT infrastructure, which contributed to the company problem

6. What benefits did such an enterprise system bring to the company?

Case Study

CRM Helps Adidas Know its Customers One Shoe Buyer at a Time

Adidas is a leading global maker of athletic shoes, clothing, and accessories, selling 1.2 million pairs of shoes each day. The company is headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Germany, has over 57,000 employees worldwide, and produced net sales of 23.6 billion Euros (U.S. $27 billion) in 2019. It is the second largest sportswear manufacturer in the world after Nike.

Adidas is also a leader in digital and online marketing. The company's most important store is no longer a physical store - it's a website. The Adidas website is a key channel for offering connected and personalized customer experiences and has led to increased sales. E-commerce is Adidas's most profitable point-of-sale channel, with online sales reaching 5.509 billion Euros (U.S. $6.180 billion) in 2019.

Adidas does not compete on price but on the quality of its brand and the customer experience. The transition from physical to digital as the preferred shopping medium has shaped the way the company keeps up with changing customer preferences. Adidas first launched a simple E-commerce website, but the management did not invest in knowing the most profitable customers or knowing customers' preferences. This made employees' work more difficult, as the marketing staff did not know about their returning customers, resulting in ineffective marketing campaigns that did not target the right customers or understand their needs and preferences. The sales staff also did not have a single view of the customers' database; if a customer shopped online and wanted to come to a shop to exchange his/her items, the sales staff could not retrieve the order number as it was not sold in their shop but was held in a separate database for the online webstore.

To serve customers better, and to know more about them and manage all its relationships with them, Adidas turned to Salesforce.com, which features cloud-based tools for customer relationship management (CRM) and application development. Salesforce.com helps Adidas identify key customer segments, develop closer ties tocustomers, and design differentiated experiences tailored to each customer's needs. Salesforce CRM tools make it possible for Adidas to have a single view of each customer across all the various channels through which that person interacts with the company.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a CRM platform that allows marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. The Marketing Cloud incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social media, web personalization, advertising, content creation, content management, and data analysis. Every imaginable customer interaction and engagement is covered. The software includes predictive analytics to help make and improve decisions such as what channel would be preferable for a given message. The Marketing Cloud is

connected to Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to provide a unified experience and prevent customers from being contacted separately by representatives from sales, marketing, and service groups. Service Cloud is a platform for customer service and support.

Adidas is now able to deploy its centralized e-commerce website globally by using the Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Commerce Cloud supports every language and currency required for the company's business throughout the globe. Adidas uses the knowledge of individual customers and their preferences obtained through Commerce Cloud to create different and better products, which can be manufactured and delivered to the customer very rapidly. Adidas is also using the Salesforce DMP data management platform to capture online and web behavior from digital actions across all channels and devices.

To move even closer to the customer, Adidas developed a mobile app that customizes content, interactions, and products based on the customer's personal preferences and behavior that have been identified via various digital points of engagement. The app features customized product recommendations, color preference and location, order tracking, blog posts, personalized articles, videos, real-time updates concerning an individual's sport and sports star preferences, and an intelligent online chat tool called Einstein to help answer customer questions and make more customized product recommendations. The app works with Apple Pay and Android Pay mobile payment systems.

Jacqueline Smith-Dubendorfer, Adidas Vice President of Digital Experience Design, believes that using Salesforce for customer relationship management has enhanced the company's ability to treat each customer as an individual. Who is this person? How much do we know about that individual? Where did that person come from? What is that person interested in? With Salesforce CRM tools, Adidas can now answer these questions much more easily. The CRM provides the information for Adidas to adapt what it presents to the customer to deliver as close as it can to what the customer is actually looking for. Adidas can now connect one-to-one with every customer, across multiple channels and on any device.