XYZ Inc. produces raised floors, movable walls, adaptable technology, lighting, furniture systems, seating, storage, and wood case goods. With over 600 dealers worldwide, this $1.2 billion, Holland, Michigan company designs, manufactures, and ships a significant amount of goods within the North America Free Trade Association (NAFTA) region, representing approximately $200 million annuallyabout 85 percent of XYZ's overall exports.

To take advantage of NAFTA benefits, XYZ Inc. needed to automate the process of qualifying goods for preferential treatment for export from both the U.S. and Canada. This process required the acquisition of NAFTA certification data for over 43,000 purchased parts, from more than 1,000 suppliers worldwide. Previously, this process had been outsourced to a third-party service provider, where the NAFTA analysis was managed separately, and results were manually uploaded into the export documentation system.

Paper NAFTA certificates were created for parts on transactional shipments and sent via courier to XYZ's brokers and customers daily. While the process worked to some extent, it proved to be very cumbersome, and the third-party was only able to qualify about 50 percent of XYZ's 16,000-plus export products. The imperative was clearXYZ Inc. needed to take control over the NAFTA compliance system across the company's entire product line.

In the current system XYZ Inc. has four data files in Finance, production, purchasing and R&D departments. XYZ asks you to recommend a system to accumulate the information and ease the manipulation and process data.

Questions to answer:

1. You will read the above Case Study and answer the Case Study questions.
2. You will critically examine the case study and understand the background of the issues.
3. You will provide your suggestions and feedback as to how you would have dealt with the issues/situation/challenge if you were the operations manager of the organization discussed in the case.
4. You will recommend solutions to the case and answer the assigned questions.