John Schmidt was the Operations Manager of SchmidtCo, a distributor company of automobile parts for European industrial and automotive manufacturers. John handles a project that would replace an old inventory management system with a new system to have a better Inventory management. Due to several reasons the project was already lagging and exceeded budget. John was uncomfortable in deciding what to do to stay in business. The best option available for him is to appoint a full-time project manager and hire a new IT person, rather than firing IT manager or changing the vendor.
Number of words: 94
Situation Analysis
SchmidtCo was a Philadelphia-based distributor company of automobile parts for European industrial and automotive manufacturers. John Schmidt was the Operations Manager of this family-owned-business firm founded by his grand-father in 1950 and currently run by his father. The company distributed nearly 10,000 different items imported from twenty-one manufacturers to over a thousand different destinations. The company shipped 20,000,000 pieces a year ranging from nuts and bolts to radiators. This volume and complexity [EN 1] meant that information system was literally the backbone of the $40-million company.
The current computer system that controlled operations and inventory management was obsolete, unreliable, 18-year-old system which was inadequate to meet the rapidly expanding product lines. As the vendor of the original
