Winter Gear Distributors, WGD for short, is one of FastFit’s main suppliers. They are a distributor of winter sports equipment and apparel, everything from the latest cross country skies to winter clothing that you could wear to the North Pole if needed. WGD has over four hundred (400) customers, deals with about forty-five (45) different manufacturers and processes an average of two hundred (200) orders a day. While their products are state of the art, their information systems are out of date. As part of the work on this business case, the reader will need to consider the upgrade or replacement of old WGD legacy systems by an integrated enterprise-wide system for both transacting and management control that will also improve the firm’s customer responsiveness, strengthen their bottom line, and even address their emerging competitors who are operationally far more efficient than WGD.

WGD has been in business for thirty (30) years and like many similar businesses it has three operating departments, namely: sales, operations and accounting. The Sales Department deals directly with their customers, including FastFit. Sales personnel take orders over the phone and manually complete paper order forms. They later confirm with the customer each order and its delivery date. The Sales team is responsible for generating sales and revenues, understanding customer needs, and providing a high level of customer service. The Operations Department commits to delivery dates for orders through Sales, fills and ships customer orders, manages the inventory, and orders products from WGD suppliers, who are manufacturers of sports equipment and apparel. The major goal of Operations is to fill orders quickly, accurately and cheaply. Finally the Accounting Department reviews and approves all orders as submitted by Sales, issues invoices, and insures that customers pay for goods shipped in accordance with the terms and conditions of the transaction, typically net thirty (30) days. The primary main goals of Accounting are to ensure customer compliance with WGD’s business rules, to manage the firm’s cash flow, and to maintain a very accurate understanding of the financial state of the company.

While the Sales and Accounting departments are on two different floors of an office building downtown, the Operations department is located about three miles away near the Interstate. The information systems in place include a single personal computer that the Sales Department administrator uses to copy orders into the system on that PC from the hand-written order forms. Operations employs an IBM ASA 400 system that runs an inventory management application. This system runs three (3) CRT-terminals, one in the loading/receiving dock, one in the warehouse, and one in the Director of Operations’ office. Finally the Accounting Department has a small local area network with four (4) personal computers, a printer, and a file server attached. None of the three departmental systems currently communicate with each other. Furthermore, each of the aforementioned systems was purchased by its respective Department to serve the operational needs of that particular Department only.

The Case Study Question Set:

The following questions accompany the case and are both useful in helping the student think about WGD case study content and as a homework assignment due prior to an actual