Company Overview: Penelope’s Future Boxes

Penelope has always been interested in computers, the Internet, and electrical engineering. A few years ago she decided to exercise her entrepreneurial spirit and venture out on her own. She established a small start-up aimed at capitalizing on what has become the open-source hardware movement. Her first designs were Raspberry-pi, Arduino, OLinuXino, and BeagleBoard projects focused on household items, such as smart thermostats, garage door openers, household locks, and automated kitty-litter boxes. The orders have been coming in steadily and her business has grown and has become a stable company. Encouraged by her success, she has decided to go big and create a Digital Enterprise focused on the “Internet of Things” (IoT).

Penelope is smart, but she needs help. She is aware that there already exist companies that are latching on to the IoT idea. She believes that a Digital Enterprise that thinks like a small company and stays close to the customer can succeed where larger, established firms diversifying into the IoT market may have trouble. She believes that she can create products that customers naturally want instead of what large companies think that customers want. Thus, she believes that she can create several standardized products, as well as many customized/personalized IoT products based on input from customers.

She currently operates the business from a single location in the southeastern United States. The location has a manager, a set of five engineers and programmers, and roughly 30 employees, most of which perform manufacturing tasks. She purchases the different component boards from various suppliers. Other components, such as housings, display screens, etc., that she uses to create her products are sourced from other suppliers, while others that must be specially designed are designed in partnership with other companies. Penelope’s currently makes some standard products as mentioned above, but also solicits customer inquiries to identify new products. Penelope’s uses a Web site that allows customers to provide their ‘wants’ for new products. The product ideas tend to come in two varieties. Custom products are requested for specialized applications and do not tend to be things that most others would want. Most of these must be turned down at present because the requests are high-end applications for which the company does not have the expertise. Most of the ‘Recurring request’ products are ideas that are submitted by several people. Custom requests are given immediately to the engineers and programmers to determine if they can be completed. These essentially comprise small projects that are worked on as extra work. Recurring requests are allowed to accumulate. Each month the recurring requests are given to the engineers and programmers to determine if they can be designed as a standard product. If so, these products go in the regular product line-up and are announced as new products on the company’s product catalog page. Of course, Penelope’s is selling directly to customers at the moment. She also advertises to potential customers in the two segments. Limited ads for standardized products are placed in various magazines, but she mainly relies on social media. Potential industrial or agricultural clients tend to come by word of mouth.

Penelope, together with her management team, has decided to embark on a campaign of growth for the next three years, executing the steps outlined below. Her plan for growth goes as follows:

1. By the end of the first year (assume that the year began in January), she will expand her current operations. She plans to acquire the needed space to function as a headquarters for the main business. Penelope’s will also acquire a separate location to serve as a manufacturing plant. She will hire a lead engineer, operations personnel, an office manager, a couple of lead programmers, and a lead plant manager for this new location.
2. By the end of the second year, Penelope will open similar office space and assembly plants in other regions of the US. Her belief is that different climates, topographies, and lifestyles would increase opportunities for innovative new products and/or custom-built IoT devices.
3. By the end of the third year, Penelope plans to dominate the IoT market in the U.S. by going national and international. She wants to create her own line of open-source hardware products, instead of relying on the developers of Raspberry-Pi, Arduino, etc. She will add to her growing business another installation which will concentrate on manufacturing the new hardware.

Business Strategy and Business Process Architecture

• Business Process Architecture B (25 points). Using the APQC Cross-Industry Process Classification Framework (or another industry-specific one from APQC), create a process architecture for Penelope’s as it currently operates. Make sure to show a list of processes categorized as support, core and/or management processes. What do these processes do?