Social Media and Data Analytics

ORGANIC GARDENS SUPERMARKETS CASE

Organic Gardens Supermarkets are based NY, PA, NJ and MA.  Their 11 stores and 1 headquarters location support the sales of traditional supermarket items, with their closest competitors being Wegmans and Shoprite.   Philadelphia is the headquarters location.  This location has 30 office staff, 5 Marketing analysts, 5 managerial staff, plus 12 individuals who run the firm’s IT.  All 11 stores have 18 cashiers (2 shifts of 9), 5 warehouse staff, 16 in-store workers (2 shifts of 8 e.g., in the meats section), 2 Assistant Managers, 1 Manager, and 5 other Office staff.   Stores are open every day but the office is closed on the weekend, except for emergency accounting and IT staff.

Organic Gardens seeks to modernize all store systems, centralize retail processing for all stores (each is currently run independently) in order to create new efficiencies and introduce new services such as home shopping. In addition, they want to allow stores to transfer goods from other stores to meet demand.

Each store currently sells on average, $120,000 worth of goods daily, of which about 7% is profit. Organic Gardens believe that better customer relationships (based on a new loyalty program and card) and an improved supply chain could increase profits to 12% and increase sales by 14% through investing in new technology.

The new system must satisfy the following requirements:

1. Support a new frequent customer loyalty card—this gets customers discounts and enables marketing efforts and analysis of customer behavior.
2. Support POS transactions. (No new POS / cash registers are needed).
3. Allow Data Mining and Analytics. Analyzing transactions will allow more targeted flyers and coupons to be sent to customers.
4. Support a more efficient supply chain. Every aspect of Organics’ supply chain will be supported using appropriate software.
5. The system will flag past due accounts i.e., for catered services, and generate dunning (overdue payment) letters, plus provide reports to assist collection staff.
6. An online shopping operation will be created to allow customers to purchase their groceries and other goods via the Internet.
7. Auditable: The system will provide audit reports tracking access to sensitive data as well as validation of financial record keeping.
8. Support a Social Media Initiative: The system will use social media e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and clickstream analysis of their website to better understand, and communicate with their customers.

There are older PCs at all current locations that will be disposed of. All stores and headquarters should be fully computerized with the new retailing system and networked within a total budget of $300,000. Your group must consider appropriate form factors for computing equipment used by staff and allow BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device) by managers and analysts as well. Compare and contrast SaaS solutions versus shrink-wrapped retailing solutions.  Enterprise-wide analyses and reporting are required.

As mentioned earlier, Organic Gardens wants the new website to enable customers to shop from home. Development costs (excluding IT personnel) must be paid for out of the project budget.  All PCs, servers, networking equipment, software and/or external services must also be paid for out of the budget (services for 3 years). You are also not allowed to increase your budget by firing people.  Assume any existing equipment has no resale value.

The supermarket also wants its marketing analysts to be able to conduct data discovery and business analytics, so a business analytics software program must be selected.

The development team should undertake the following assignments:

1. Select software for Organic Gardens to handle their requirements. The software should handle front-end transactions and back-end requirements, and may be cloud-based or onsite server-based.

Netsuite is the software. http://www.netsuite.com/portal/home.shtml

2. Select all computer hardware for Organic Gardens including computing platforms used by management and workers and any servers, if used. No parts of the current architecture may be reused, except POS devices.

Dell professional P170S 17 monitor is hardware.

3. Select networking hardware and services to support the communication requirements of Organic Gardens’
4. Select the database architecture and data warehousing architecture to support the daily transactions and the data analytics requirements of the supermarket.
5. Describe how Organic Gardens Supermarkets will use social media and integrate that into their data analytics effort.
6. Produce a schematic that graphically shows the architecture of the new system i.e., hardware (including networking components), software, data, people, and procedures.
7. Define the expected benefits of the new system and for intangible benefits, produce your assumptions using equivalent real-life case studies and/or best practices.
8. YOUR REPORT SHOULD NOT EXCEED 10 PAGES, ONE AND A HALF SPACED, 12 POINT FONT, EXCLUDING REFERENCES AND THE COVER PAGE.

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