Moore Medical Corporation – Analysis to It Investments

CASE ANALYSIS Document Version: 1. 0 Moore Medical Corporation Analysis to IT investments Dilip IT for Business Managers Business Background †¢ Moore Medical Corporation founded in 1947 is a distributor of medical supplies. The company had built its business model taking care of specific groups of practitioners such as podiatrists and emergency medical service personnel. †¢ Moore provides more than 8500 products and the company had divided its customers into six groups. Moore has a strong tradition of accurately maintaining customer orders. †¢ Moore’s current IT infrastructure and spending was above the industry average implementing most of the latest technologies like ERP, telemarketing and e-commerce. Case Issues and Results Issue – 1: Linda Autore, the CEO of Moore Medical, Inc was unsure if she needed to spend any of the company’s funds on CRM software. Solution and Analysis: It is definitely true that CRM provides an integrated record of all customer contacts through all channels, assembling an optimal schedule of appointments for sales people which would lead to a better consistency of Moore’s interaction with its customers; however from the analysis of the case I see that Moore has currently a tradition of accurately and quickly filling customer orders which had no problems. From the technology perspective it is definitely great to get a company like Moore to be updated with CRM but however looking at the current problem that Moore faces I believe it’s not worth wasting an investment in CRM. Issue – 2: Moore has spent $7 million in implementing the ERP; however Moore’s ERP implementation was not very satisfying since it was not fully utilizing the information retained in the system and was also inferior to what had been in place previously. Solution and Analysis: ERP is an excellent database system provided it has been implemented with respect to the company’s requirements. From the case I see that Moore’s ERP was unsuccessful and had shortcomings that were required to be fixed immediately. ERP covers all areas from finance, logistics to marketing and also Moore’s latest e-commerce website. I believe an additional investment of $600,000 to purchase the ‘Bolt on’ software is necessary to realize the $7 million investment made in the ERP. Issue – 3: One of the major problems faced with Moore in their ERP systems was their poor implementation of demand planning. Moore’s performance on the â€Å"Perfect Order† was way below their expected goal of 90% as shown in Exhibit 5. Solution and Analysis: It is mentioned in the case that 84% of the non-perfect orders are due to demand planning issues. Even if the company spends $300,000 on each of the four models which are in consideration to solve the forecasting issue the company would spend only $1. million. It must be noted that this additional cost will help the company in increased revenues, reduced costs and better customer satisfaction. Issue – 4: Is Company’s decision to move to personal e-commerce a right choice? Solution: From the available information and looking at exhibit 7 I believe the traffic and income generated towards personal e-commerce has been increased substantially in six months since the start of the new website. However my suggestion to Moore is that it withdraws from yahoo is a phased manner. Relevance and analysis From the analysis of Moore Corporation I believe they have made relevant investments in IT infrastructure; however the company lacks a strategy to implement them. I believe the company needs to prioritize their requirements from their business point of view. Here I believe CRM is an important tool to improve customer relationships but however they need to set their prior projects right before setting their eye on CRM. Their initial priority is to set right the ERP which would set right the demand planning issue also. Setting the ERP right would help also help in achieving good revenue from e-commerce applications. IT is definitely a solution to a particular problem, such as customer acquisition and retention, increased revenues and provides employees an efficient tool; however the goals of IT should be linked to the corporate strategy. Investing blindly in IT without a strategy will not derive the desired result.