OIM Final Assignment: Craven Books Report

By Lucas Rodrigo Ribeiro Ostjen

(@00503777)

M.Sc. in Project Management Course Operations and Information Management

Tutor: Mr. George Thomas
University of Salford & Robert Kennedy College
Salford Business School

16th July 2017

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Summary

This paper aims to produce an analysis on the Craven Books case study, where a misalignment of
strategy turns into a catastrophe, making the company lose 90% of their customers, because of it 60%
of their employees become redundant, and Craven Books was forced to release them. The paper will
review the business strategy using the SWOT analysis to point their strengths and weakness internally,
and the opportunities and threats that the external market offer. Based on the requirement a business
process model will be presented showing the actual flow of the business activities in contrast with a
proposed model which could guarantee a safer environment when treating the customers orders.
Once presented the business process models and the strategy analysis there will be presented a report
containing an overview of the status of the Craven Books business with suggestions which could help
the company to achieve a better performance through changes regarded to the mistakes when
introducing a new digital strategy. Along with the report a table with some open source CRM software
will be suggested the using of it to mitigate the relationship problems with their customers. The report
gives some recommendations to Craven Books management and conclude that the lack of knowledge
on information systems and poor managements were some reasons which explain why the company
is losing market share. The last section concerns to the contribution made online during this module
of studies with a self-assessment on these contributions.

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Table of Contents
Craven Books Business Process Models and strategy analysis ............................................................... 4
SWOT Analysis Purpose: Craven Books CRM platform ........................................................................... 4
Craven Books Information System Report .............................................................................................. 7
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 9
Overview of the Company Background ................................................................................................ 10
Craven Books Unsuccessful Information System Strategy ................................................................... 10
What Craven Books must consider preventing and avoid the issues? ................................................. 11
Cloud-Based Open Source CRM Software ............................................................................................ 13
Recommendations ................................................................................................................................ 14
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 14
References ............................................................................................................................................ 15
Reflection on the Contribution through online discussion ................................................................... 16

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Craven Books Business Process Models and strategy analysis
After 40 years in the comic books market competing with several companies, in terms of
agility, quality of product and services, Craven Books are facing difficulties concerning with the
Information System and digital strategy chose to drive their business changes. The company which
provided growth with profits expanded their activities along the north of United States and Mexico,
furthermore, there is a plan to approach the European market using an Information Technology
interface however the strategy chosen impacted oddly on the result which they pursued. In order to
restructure the business and determine the right business approach an analysis of the business will be
made using the SWOT method in order to define what are the Strengths and Weakness of the
company and to analyze the Opportunities and Threats that market offers. The SWOT analysis helps
to get the maximum out of the future opportunities and alleviate the treats by working on its
weakness (Wikipedia, 2017)

SWOT Analysis Purpose: Craven Books CRM platform

Below we show the actual business process model and the proposed business process which is the
base to define our analysis;

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A. Strengths
1. Increase sales efficiency: the company which knows their consumer need are more
reliable to achieve higher rate of loyalty from its customers
2. Ensure customer satisfaction: Turns the customer more dependable of the company
avoiding looking for a competitor product
3. Knowledge on potential customers: Collecting data can improve the knowledge about the
customers
4. Focus on finding customer who brings more profits: Customers are the key to increase
profits and CRM improve this approach

B. Weakness
1. Insufficient defined activities: It refers to internal activities in organizations like process
time and costs, employee productivity, data quality and coordination of tasks. (Haram,
2005)
2. Internal Clients lack of preparation: The implementation of a new system will impact on
cultural changes among the staff of the company
3. Overload of unnecessary information

C. Opportunities
1. Customer satisfaction: CRM can predict the needs of the customer analyzing their data
and business history

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 2. Improve relationship with customers: Utilizing the acquired data can help to be one step
ahead regarding to the customer needs
3. Improve communication interaction: New technologies bring new approaches making a
significant improve on the flow of communication
D. Threats
1. Decrease of revenue: relying totally on CRM can invert the customer reaction and the
revenue can decrease (Jayashree, et al., 2011)
2. Over automation: companies with a big network and a small number of staff relying too
much on CRM can reduce the personal interaction resulting in losses.
3. Weak combination with the business strategy: If CRM is not aligned with the business
strategy it can turns to a problem and will not achieve the proposed goals, companies
must fill the existing gaps between these two.
To achieve a significant competitive advantage within the market which Craven Books are positioned
the use of CRM can have positive results. Each day the expectation of customers increases and
business and services must walk holding hands with these expectations. CRM into the business will
help to serve better their customers moreover the right CRM approach could guarantee the return of
the clients which left the Craven Books network, using the new CRM platform effectively will bring
new customers which could reflect on sales increase and consequently the return of revenue.

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Craven Books Information System Report
By Lucas Ostjen

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Table of Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 9
Overview of the Company Background ................................................................................................ 10
Craven Books Unsuccessful Information System Strategy ................................................................... 10
What Craven Books must consider preventing and avoid the issues? ................................................. 11
Cloud-Based Open Source CRM Software ............................................................................................ 13
Recommendations ................................................................................................................................ 14
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 14
References ............................................................................................................................................ 15

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Introduction

As the advance on the technological field grow fast inside the business market, these
advancements bring to the society pace in all activities they perform. Thus, the improvements had
brought a scenario where Information System had change the way companies deal with their network
in general. Information System (IS) could be described as the interrelated components working
together to collect, process, store, and disseminate information to support decision making,
coordination, control, analysis, and visualization in an organization furthermore Information System
is often related towards competitiveness on the business market and it can modify the workflow of
the enterprises which accept its strategy concept and apply it, reviewing the their business strategy in
order to optimized and integrate different departments and areas within the company. The will of
improving business achievement through better efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness,
combined with innovative applications of Information technology, has heightened the awareness of
both IT and business managers towards more strategically oriented approaches for planning and
management (Luftman, et al., 1993)
Business and management society realized that there is a need to align strategically business and
IT planning and it has been described as critically important however more and more problematic
(Information Resources Management Association. International Conference, 1999). Taking advantage
of technological advances in information systems and computing have made companies achieve some
strategic developments, these could be new paths on the work performance in a certain organisation.
Enterprises which have align their business and information system strategy properly are noticeably
know in the business market on the other hand those who have not plan and focus on the subject
have faced their market share decline in considerably proportions.
Primarily, this paper has the objective to provide some details about the failure on the Craven
Books IT system project. Furthermore, it will be provided some points that should have been
considered to prevent what had been faced by the company. The discussion will also include a shorter
analysis on a new information system project structure, part of this paper will also be the discussion
about the concepts and application of Open Source Software as an option to restructure the business.
Lastly, the discussion will also try to recommend what shall be done and it will eventually conclude
how to avoid such failures on managing IS projects.

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Overview of the Company Background
Craven Books is a comic magazine seller in Utah City, USA, with a 40 years life competing against
other distributors of comics magazines, and books. The company was founded and evolve in the
market place extending their presence along the North of the United States and Mexico. As the
company has been able to encounter growth both in profit and in the number of their regular
customers, the volume of sales accelerated considerably.
In this regard, the company based on the growth strategy decided to develop a digital strategy,
recruiting an IT specialist which was assigned to use a new information system as part of their business
strategy. The investment has been made within a platform that would include all areas of the
operation of the business from ordering, to processing, accounting, inventory and dispatch. Craven
books aim that the new information system will ensure more effectiveness on logistics and a step
ahead on the competitiveness of the market. However, as the project started its implementation the
expectation has not been achieved and Craven books was destabilized losing market share and turning
down their competitiveness.

Craven Books Unsuccessful Information System Strategy

As mentioned, due to the objective to have an integrated and efficient distribution system the
management of Craven Books decide to hire an Information Technology (IT) Specialist to align the
Information System (IS) strategy along with the business strategy, besides that a new store manager
has been hired to manage the distribution of the products between the warehouses around the
country. The management planned to approach the European Market with their products through the
same platform and once the system was working at the local market, there would be a built in multi-
interface and e-commerce to have a digital presence, promoting their products into the new market.
Craven Books IT specialist has opted to outsource the digital strategy to an independent consultant,
who decide to set-up technological tools for the internal and external process. A weighting machine
was added in the production process to help the store to check the order through the weight check,
following the same philosophy a mapping machine was added to link the customers orders from the
digital interface and locate the relevant items. For the external process (orders and marketing
approach) it has been decided to create a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) cloud-based
interface to help both customers and employees to interact with each other with transactions and
electronic payment.
The new approach was expected to provide more competitiveness and agility on their process.
However, after a year of outsourcing the digital strategy Craven Books has failed and they lose 90% of
their customers in consequence the company faced a situation where 60% of their employees were
redundant for the business and they had to be released. Regarded to the actual situation where
Craven Books find themselves, the following can be considered as the pleadings for their unsuccessful
digital strategy approach. One of the reasons that the company failed on their IT systems was the
inability of the IT specialist to define and present the appropriate IS strategic plan and align it with the
business strategy, the lack of knowledge was shown when a decision for outsourcing was made, and
here we find the second reason for their failure, Craven books IT specialist relied too much on their

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consultant and the system suppliers, the choice to create a CRM interface specific for them was made
without the certainty if the project would really works, beyond that, this solution should have been
compared against the existing software packages available on the market in terms of effectiveness
and efficiency, another instance that shows that Craven book management relied too much on their
consultant, is the fact that they allowed to interfere on the production process when the weighting
and mapping machines were added on the business workflow. A code bar tracing system, as a feature
on the CRM system, could avoid the use of these machines, making the counting of the products per
unit, not per weight (which is quite trick), and mapping the customers package with a unique code to
allocate them in the right warehouse. Seek for advice is not a wrong thing to do, however what is
given is an idea, one of thousand paths that can be chosen, and belongs to Cravens management to
decide with consciousness and balance the things out to have a better trade-off.
Its not very clear how the project was structured but it seems that no one was assigned to
managed the project, there is no project team assigned which shows a lack of commitment between
the parts, as nobody from Craven books had the accountability to handle with the necessary
requirements to make the project successful, this can be pointed as a major issue as well.

What Craven Books must consider preventing and avoid the issues?
As the reasons, why the IS strategy of Craven Books failed have been presented, it is necessary
to discuss the instances which the management should consider assuring the success of the project.
Some important points shall be taken in consideration when trying to create or install a system. Well
Craven Books case shows that they cant identify a suitable software for the company, as well they
couldnt align the Digital Strategy along with the Business Strategy and besides that there was no
preparation or pre-activities planned before launch the solution. To mitigate the consequences which
are faced by Craven Books the following points should be considered before implement the new
system.
1. Selection of appropriate strategic model: Strategic models will be helpful, to assure that the
changes made by the information system are executed effectively. A framework of evaluation
shall be made based on the drivers which align both Information System and Business
strategy, theres a need that Craven Books must understand these drivers using how and
why questions, and to understand the dimensions that may affect such justification, using
the what questions. As what are the IS strategic drivers that affect Business Strategy.
(Basahel & Irani, 2009)
2. Contingency Plan: A plan should be developed to act when the system fails, procedures must
be clear in case of a breakdown of any part of the business process and for the new system.
3. Realistic Project Scope & Benchmarking: The project scope should have realistic targets and
benchmarking with other company could be an interesting approach as this technique will
allow to compare the best practices from other industries with similar business activities.
Benchmarking will help Craven books to understand and evaluate the current position of the
business in relation with the best industry practices and to identify areas where
improvements must be made.
4. End user support: Training must be given to all employees and end users, to prepare them to
handle the new system, moreover end users concerns shall be taken in consideration to avoid
negative feeling on the new system.

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 5. Stakeholder involvement: All parties involved on the project must understand the purpose of
the project, critical issues shall be addressed by the moment they are evolving. Here is where
Craven books management shall keep special attention.
6. Software Selection: As noticed Craven books management do not have the knowledge to
select on their own the software which would be suitable for their application, however the
advice here is to procure advisors and consultants with a high level of expertise both technical
and operational for software selection. However, this approach could have an expensive cost
and knowing that Craven Books is not able to acquire new expenses as per their actual losses
an Open Source Software (OSS) can be the exit for the business optimization.

As mention on point 6 open source software (OSS) should and option as a low cost CRM solution
for Craven Books, nowadays there are several cloud-based interface packages offered free with many
application which is necessary to run a business, furthermore, these solutions can be customized with
a lower cost when comparing to a system developed from zero, unfortunately as per the actual
business situation Craven Books is not in the position to invent the wheel, even more, most of these
software offer support and training what fits on the actual business scenario of Craven Books. Below
is a table showing the comparison of what the OSS available in the market could provide and help the
company to run their business.

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Cloud-Based Open Source CRM Software

Software Free Support Free Storage Free Contacts Free Users Email Marketing Cloud- Self- Upgrade Fee
Capabilities Based Hosted
Insightly Online 200Mb 2500 2 US$12/user/mo
Community
Really Simple Full Service 100Mb Unlimited 2 US$14/user/mo
Systems
FreeCRM Not Available Unlimited 1 Million 100 US$29,95/user/mo

Bitrix24 Not Available 5Gb Unlimited 12 US$39/user/mo

Raynet Full Service 50Mb 150 2 US$19/user/mo

HubSpot Full Service Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited US$10/user/mo

(A & Cara, 2017)

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Note that each system mentioned at the above table will serve some companies better than others so
deep study on the available software must be made by the Craven Books management and advisors
before chose blindly a software.
What is mention here is just a few packages of the many available on the market, however as
Craven Books has lost 90% of their customers, a strong marketing campaign to revert it shall be placed
into the business strategy and in this case, the Hubspot CRM can give a good help. The service is
provided with full support, and this is a key feature to train the system users moreover it has many
unlimited features as storage and users which reduce the cost of Craven Books when it comes to
acquire new hardware, beyond that, the software is cloud based which makes no need to invest on
expansion of network. Hubspot is a well know company which offers software products for inbound
marketing and sales and thats why they offer their CRM software for free as this software is intended
to be a gateway system to their marketing automation software (Hubspot, 2017), which Craven Books
could acquire in a later stage when the business starts to move forward again.

Recommendations

The result on the implementation of the digital strategy was a catastrophe for Craven Books, in
addition there is nobody who could be direct responsible for the mistakes, said that, the project must
be called off immediately, the hired IT specialist and the consultant must be removed. Craven Books
now should seek for an experienced consultant with a valuable experience in OSS as the situation
requires cost reduction, once selected the right consultant, the next step shall be the early
involvement between parts to understand the business strategy to develop the right information
system approach. Craven Books should not rely completely on the consultants judgement and they
should carefully review the advice, collect all the necessary opinion and benchmarking will help to find
where improvements shall be made. The management must discuss cautiously the feasibility to
implement the new system seeking for a better outcome for future of the company. Thus, the planning
and the stakeholders involvement will be a crucial step to drive these new alignments, the
contingency plan must be made and put in action to cover any issue which could happen from the
new system platform as the business must be running independently if the system works or not.

Conclusion
It is clear the use of information system inside the business can have completely different impact when
the companies do not align or are not able to align the strategies between Information System and
the Business. Indeed, IS have given to the people the opportunity to create new perspectives where
decision-making capacities, communication, geography, different political scenarios and data-
processing has no limits. Industries require information technology, to position themselves inside of
the marketplace with a strong competitiveness and agility, beyond that, information technology give
freedom to companies to act in any place where they find the market attractive for their products and
services. Hence Craven Books needs to solve their internal problem and keep competing into the
marketplace they must realize that planning and preparation is the key when implanting a new
approach either for their internal and external customers, to prevent facing issues which can bring a
scenario where there may be no turning back.

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References
A, C. & Cara, W., 2017. Capterra. [Online]
Available at: http://blog.capterra.com/free-and-open-source-crm/
[Accessed 09 July 2017].

Basahel, A. & Irani, Z., 2009. EVALUATION OF STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS PLANNING (SISP)
TECHNIQUES: DRIVER PERSPECTIVE. Izmir, European and Mediterranean Conference on Information
Systems.

Educational Media Australia (Firm), 1999. The Great Information Technology Horror Story,
Melbourne: South Melbourne : EMA.

Haram, A., 2005. Development of a framework to retain customers through customer relationship
management. School of Computing - Dubling institute of Technology, pp. 4-8.

Hubspot, 2017. Hubspot.com. [Online]

Available at: https://www.hubspot.com/our-story

Information Resources Management Association. International Conference, 1999. Managing

Information Technology Resources in Organizations in the Next Millennium. Hershey: Idea Group Inc.

Jayashree, S., Pahlavanzadeh, S. & Shojaee, S., 2011. A critical analysis of Customer Relationship
Management from strategic perspective. Hong Kong, IACSIT Press, pp. 340 -345.

Luftman, J. N., 1996. Applying the Strategic Alignment Model. Competing in the Information Age
Strategic Alignment in Practice, pp. 43-69.

Luftman, J. N., Lewis, P. R. & Oldach, S. H., 1993. Transforming the enterprise: The alignment of
business and information technology strategies. IBM Systems Journal, pp. 198-221.

Maylor, H., 2010. Project Management Fourth Edition. England: Pearson.

Slack, N., Chambers, S. & Johnston, R., 2010. Operations Management 6th Edition. England: Pearson.

Stevenson, W. J., 2012. Operations Management 11th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Steyn, H., 2008. Project management: a multi-disciplinary approach, 2nd ed. Pretoria: FPM Publisher.

Wikipedia, 2017. Wikipedia. [Online]

Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis
[Accessed 12 July 2017].

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Reflection on the Contribution through online discussion
Along this module, I have been quite absent from the online discussions, however I follow up through the email each and every point from my colleagues,
most of my posts were quite late and there was not too much interaction. I would consider my participation irrelevant as some external issues (personal &
professional) put me away from the platform. However I would like to express my gratitude to everyone that participate with commitment, their point of
views helped to clarify many doubts that I had through the module and understand and improve my critical thinking. Below are the links of my few
participation.

Unit 1 https://campus.college.ch/forum/posts/50115-unit-1-activity?page=2 Unit 2 https://campus.college.ch/forum/posts/50264-unit-2-activity?page=2

Unit 5 https://campus.college.ch/forum/posts/50427-unit-5-activity?page=2Unit 6 https://campus.college.ch/forum/posts/50465-unit-6-activity?page=2

80+ 70-79 60-69 50-59 40-49 0-40

Made several good

Made 1 or 2
Quality of contributions and one or Made several good Made a few good Made a few valid
postings, of poor Did not contribute.
contributions more outstanding contributions. contributions contributions
quality
contribution.

Used ideas/
Clear referencing of Clear referencing of all Cut and paste or
Attribution of Clear referencing of all Sources generally words of others
well-chosen and highly sources, some absent
references sources. referenced. without
relevant sources relevant... contributions.
attribution.

Skill shown in weaving Skill shown in weaving

Little or no
Evidence of contributions into the contributions into Some evidence of links
Basic recognition of recognition of
collaboration/ discussions and wiki, discussion and / or wiki, to contributions of None
contributions of others. contributions of
facilitation skills and following up on or following up on others.
others.
contributions of others. contributions of others

Deep reflection shown,

Reflection on Good reflection, with
with clear and Reflection and evidence Reflection and evidence Superficial
online clear evidence from Very little or no
substantial evidence offered, limitations in offered, limitations in reflection, very
contributions (in online discussion and / reflection/evidence.
from online discussion one of these both of these limited evidence
reflective summary) or wiki
and wiki

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