Background

The Mario's Place leadership and board thank you for your time in preparing the information system proposals. They are considering all the recent proposals for a new system but have not yet selected a winning bid due to a recent development.

Able Sisters Bakery's CEO, Mabel Able and Pauline Martinet, of Mario's Place Coffee, went to high school together, and have been working several local charities and community initiatives over the past few years. Both Mabel and Pauline have a lot in common, most importantly they love the day-to-day challenges of expanding their businesses. They have spent many hours in the past year talking about their businesses and helping each other understand ways to improve.

In the last 3 months Pauline has had a feeling she wanted something different and has been exploring options. She has taken Mario's a long way but is no longer feeling challenged. She cannot see how Mario's can compete with Starbucks or the other huge coffee retailers. So, she's begun to explore other ways of growing the business. Over dinner with Mabel, Pauline discussed combining the best of Mario's Place Coffee with Able Sister's Bakeries. Could a combination of great coffee and great baking work? Pauline had a hunch that this might be just the thing to allow them both to grow, by combining the strengths of each organization.

Mabel saw so much potential with Able Sisters and Mario's Coffee coming together. Mario's retail locations and catering service were perfect to expand their retail baked goods. LaBelle had talked about wanting to expand further into the wedding cake market. Mabel decided to pitch the merger to her sisters. After a short period of due diligence, the Able Sisters Leadership decided to move forward and merge the two organizations.

The new company, "Mario & Sisters, Inc." would have the retail locations maintain branding as Mario's, and the commercial side would switch to "Able Sister's Baking from Mario's" branding for their product line. This allows the retail brand of Mario's to stay strongly focused on their coffee and retail markets, and the well-regarded Able Sister's commercial brand to continue under the new Mario's banner.

Mario's Place Coffee is a similar size to Able Sisters Bakery. And as the Able Sister's Bakery is not far from Mario's offices, their admin teams will merge and share Mario's admin space, giving more room for the bakery's small retail counter to expand into a full caf.

They've agreed that due to skillsets, that Pauline would become the CEO of the new organization, with Mabel working as the COO. This plays to both of their strengths, allowing Pauline to focus on building the organization, while Mabel ensures that the day-to-day operations are flowing and growing well. Other leaders will continue in their respective positions for the initial phase of the merger.

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Final Exam - Case Study

Merging Two Organizations

In merging the two organizations, there are many issues to resolve. Which finance system to use; which bank; which point-of-sale; which HR system; which policies to use; organizational structure, payroll, insurance, marketing plans, customer retention, merging data; etc. The list continues well beyond the items above.

R obs on Cafe

Gastown Cafe

Bakery HQCafe

Mount Pleasant Head Office

UBC Cafe

Main Street Cafe

Yoshi (Acct)

Sabel Able Bakery Mgr

Bakery Staff

LaBelle Operations Mgr

Location Mgr Location Mgr Location Mgr Location Mgr

Downtown Cafe

Langara Cafe

Pauline (CEO)

Raymond (Accounting)

Mabel Able (COO)

Morton General Mgr

Rosalina Marketing Mgr

Perry IT Mgr

Inventory Mgr

Coordinator

Figure 2. New Mario's Locations

Figure 1. New Mario's Org Chart

There are two main issues that the company needs to address immediately. The first is payroll and Human Resource Management and the second is Inventory Management. Shortly after the merger, several employees complainedthattheirpaychequeswerewrong,andtheywerenotbeingpaidatthecorrectrate. Also, employees that had left after the merger were being scheduled to shift. Causing service issues at some of the locations.

In addition, their financial systems need to be combined into a single system. This includes all their daily transactional data, accounts receivable and accounts payable areas. The accountants can work together to keep things flowing in the short term, but a longer-term solution is needed.

Both companies also face issues with their inventory systems - they are not working. The only digital system was in Mario's Place Coffee's POS. However, that system's method of tacking inventory was not sufficient to manage the bakery inventory needs. This left the issue of running out of product, and excess waste, still a significant problem for both businesses.

To frustrate the issue, Mario's had recently deployed a web ordering app. While the new executive team was excited about the app, it did not have real time data from product inventory. Customers would order from the app, only to find the retail location could be out of product. Customer faced delays, were upset, and often had to be provided refunds for out-of-stock items.

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Final Exam - Case Study

A Consultant's Recommendations

To resolve the problems, Pauline and Mabel began exploring the idea of implementing a new system to resolve both issues, as well as address many other things within the growing company - having everything in one data system would also help with Pauline and Mabel getting access to all of the company's data quickly as they made decisions. The idea of a corporate dashboard was exciting to everyone on the leadership team!

They engaged a new Systems Consulting Firm called Ketchum Systems. Ketchum's team is strongly suggesting that Mario & Sister's Caf deploy a custom-built information system that was written by their founder's son, Ash Ketchum. It has not been installed in any businesses yet, but they say that it is fast, has bright colours, and in their functionality testing, did a great job of gamifying widget allocations. However, in their proposal, they acknowledge that the have never met with any of the key stakeholders and the software has a complete lack of features. They assured Mario's Leadership team that these modules would be added in the future. Their pricing is extremely low and flexible. Once their developer figures out what the system needs to do during Spring Break next semester, they plan to begin learning how to code it, and hope to have a sample ready in the next few years. They are telling Mario's Leadership that installations often take several years to implement, their strong recommendation is to buy now while the price is low and be able to grow with the company.

Mario's leadership is curious, given that the proposed system is very inexpensive. They are also cautious, as they know from your proposals that selecting and implementing any system is a significant project. They are worried about a lack of features in the Ketchum Systems proposal. One of Mario Sister's main priorities is to quickly understand the full business of each side and then forecast what the new organization might be capable of generating.

The new system also doesn't address the need for financial integration. Neither company is very advanced in their financial systems, using either QuickBooks (Able Sisters) or Sage50 (Mario's Place) to manage and maintain their accounting data. Able Sisters Deli locations maintain detailed paper records of their own transactional data, which is summarized in Excel and e-mailed to the accountant for data entry into QuickBooks. Where Mario's Place has sales transaction data from their POS directly uploaded into Sage50. For transactional data, Mario's Leadership knows that there is lots of data available, but all of it is in different places and formats, and none of it is easy to access or to use for generating reports. They desperately need tools that will generate information needed to understand their next steps!

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All the prior information about Able Sisters Bakery and Mario's Place Coffee is still valid. The priorities from each of those cases are still priorities here, they are not written above in the interest of space.

What kind of questions might be askedl and how to solve it