Mario's Place Coffee and Able Sister's Bakery - 202120 Background

The Mario's Place Coffee leadership thanks you for your time in preparing the proposal for a CRM. While they were ready to start the project on the winning proposal, there was a new dramatic change in store for Mario's Place Coffee that delayed the start of the project. For the moment, the implementation plan for the CRM has been delayed. For some time, Pauline Martinet has been looking for new ways to expand Mario's Place Coffee and make the business unique in the marketplace. However, she cannot see how Mario's can compete with Starbucks or the other huge coffee retailers. Pauline Martinet and Mabel Able, CEO of Able Sisters Bakery's went to high school together and have been working together with several local charities and community initiatives over the past few years. When Pauline was looking for baked goods to sell, Able Sister's Bakery was her preferred supplier. Both Mabel and Pauline have a lot in common, most importantly they love the day-to-day challenges of their businesses. They have spent many hours talking about their goals and helping each other find ways to improve. Over dinner with Mabel, Pauline discussed combining the best of Mario's Place Coffee with Able Sister's Bakeries. Pauline asked Mabel, if a combination of great coffee and great baking would work together. Pauline had a hunch that combining the strengths of each organization, it might be just the thing to allow them both to grow. 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 Sister's and Mario's Place Coffee leadership decided to move forward and merge the two organizations. The new company, "Mario & Sisters, Inc." would have the retail locations maintain its branding as Mario's, and the commercial side would switch to Able Sister'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 strong Able Sister's commercial brand to continue under its current banner. Mario's Place Coffee is a similar size to Able Sisters Bakery. They have several retail coffee locations across greater Vancouver and have a significant catering service. Pauline, the CEO, has led a small team of 5 people who manage the overall aspects of the business. This admin group shares an office in the same building as their Mount Pleasant location. As the Able Sister's Bakery is not far from Mario's offices, the administration team will move there and share that 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, but there may be changes soon.

Mario & Sisters, Inc. - 202120 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.

There are two main issues that the company needs to address immediately. The first is accounting and payroll, and the second is inventory management. Their Financial systems need to be combined into a single system. This includes all their daily transactional data, and their payroll, 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 were facing issues with their inventory systems. Able Sisters was using written ledgers to track both their ingredient inventory and retail product inventory. Mario's was using their new POS system. While the POS system was able to track retail products up for sale, it's method of tracking ingredient inventory was not sufficient to manage the bakery inventory needs. Ingredients like flour, butter, sugar, and eggs, were either going bad, or were out of stock when needed. The impact of these inventory problems was costing a lot of money and producing retail product delivery delays. Another issue was Mario's had recently deployed a web ordering app. While the new executive team was excited about the app. The app did not have live updates for product inventory. Customers would order from the app, but 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. Although Mabel was confident in high customer satisfaction and loyalty in both businesses, she was concerned this may annoy customers.

Mario & Sisters, Inc. - 202120 ERP Recommendations

To resolve this, Pauline and Mabel began working with a consulting company called Piranha Systems. They were exploring the idea of implementing a new system to resolve both of these 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! Piranha salespeople are strongly suggesting that Mario & Sisters, Inc. deploy a custom ERP that was written by the founder's 11-year-old nephew, Pete Piranha. It has not been installed in any businesses yet, but they say that it is fast, had bright colours, and in their functionality testing, did a great job of gamifying widget allocations and text displays. However, in their proposal, they are very honest about the current complete lack of integrating features. They assured Mario's Sister's Cafe that these modules would be added in the future. Their pricing is extremely low and flexible. Once their developer figures out what an ERP does, he plans to begin learning how to code it. He hopes to have a sample ready in the next few years. Given that ERP installations often take several years to implement, the consultant's 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 an ERP is a significant project. They are worried about a lack of features in the Piranha Systems proposal. One of Mario Sister's priorities is to quickly understand the full business and then forecast what the new organization might be capable of generating. They would love the reporting and organizational overview that an ERP system provides. It 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 its accounting data. Able Sisters Deli location maintains detailed paper records of each location's 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, 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! ----- 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.

Please find out what the case needs and how to implement it.