ABC Bread & Coffee bakes and sells fresh bread with several flavors of coffee every day. The company(ABC Bread & Coffee)has two divisions: Bread Division and Coffee Division. The headquarter is located at St. Cloud, Minnesota.The companyhas 12 stores in different cities in the United States. Each store has arecipe management program called RecipeManager. TheRecipeManager is initially installed and managed by the IT department in the company.This program runs at local stores on a local computer.Every early morning, employees in every store usethe RecipeManagerto decide how many breads to bake and what kinds of bread for the day. At the same time, the RecipeManager suggests what kinds of coffee flavor are best for the day, considering weather, season, temperature, and so on. TheRecipeManagerruns based on the databaselocatedin each store.The database contains information of the amount of flour, sugar, and other ingredients to bake bread, along with collecting information on weather, temperature, and so forth. In addition, each store manager can develop the store's unique recipe and sell unique bread and/or coffee. But they have to update and save therecipe informationthey developedto the database. The database in each store is synchronized each quarter of the yearwith the databaseinother stores including a database in theheadquarter at the end of March,June, September and December. The companydoes not maintain any centralized database. The new recipe must be entered in the local database to keep records, even though it is still developing.The reason to update four times a year is to encourage each store to keep secret of their own developing recipe until it is finalized. If the headquarter finds out the good recipe from stores, the company gives big awards/promotion and pushes all stores toadopt the recipe. The revenue from the new recipe goes to the store where it developed for the year. If the new recipe is updated in real time, the new recipe is accessible right away by other stores, the store where it developed the new recipe does not have any benefits.

Recently, the director ofthe CustomerService department heard that the taste of bread is different in each store. Subsequently, the different taste influences the sales of each store. According to customers' comments on the company's website, ABC Bread & Coffee seems like losing its ownuniquetastes and images because every store has different tastes.

Now, ABC Bread & Coffee considers this issue seriously. The director of the IS department suggested that databases in each store should be removed and maintain only one central data mart in the headquarter. But the director of the marketing department said that if weremove the database from each store, itdoes not encourage each store todevelop better and unique recipes in each store because every employee can get access to the recipe in developing. So, ABC Bread & Coffee may not have high qualityand uniquebread that would be a competitive advantage. The director of Human Resources added that centralization discourages empowerment to develop a new recipe.

Meanwhile, the director of the Customer Service department suggested checking customers' review and comments on the website regularly and have any kind of actions. Along with the website, he suggests using social networking tools such as Facebook or Twitter.Therefore, he said thatABC Bread & Coffeeneeds to eventually implement CRM and adopt data mining/text mining techniques to manage customers and analyze their comments.But the director of the Baking department said that customers' reviews do not have representativenessbecause only customers who have complaints post their comments. Therefore,it isnot necessaryto analyzethose customers' comments. In addition, she said that social networking is not effective because users of social networking are different from real customers who visit and purchase breads or coffees.

Finally, the CEO asked you to evaluate the usefulness of the current Recipe Manager program and its database and consider the possibility of centralization or decentralization usingCRM, data warehousing, data mart ERP, or BI system including data/text mining. Also, he wants you to evaluate current marketing strategies and propose new marketing strategies.

 

Thus, you need to identify all the issues in ABC Bread & Coffee and to develop your own short-term(within 1-2 months)and long-term(more than 5 years)plan to solve the issues.

Report must be feasible and practical and include (but not limited to) the following components.

2. Summary
4. Recommendations:
6. Overall short-term plan (1-2 months) including marketing strategies
8. Overall long-term plan (5 years and more) including marketing strategies