You have recently inherited your grandfathers coffee shop, The Broadway Cafe, which is conveniently located in downtown
Question:
You have recently inherited your grandfather’s coffee shop, The Broadway Cafe, which is conveniently located in downtown (your city). The cafe offers many different kinds of specialized coffees, teas, a full service bakery, and homemade sandwiches, soups, and salads. Your grandfather first opened The Broadway Cafe in 1952 and it was a local hotspot for many years. Unfortunately, business has been steadily declining over the last five years. Although your grandfather was an expert at running the coffee shop, it is outdated. There are no computers in the store and all ordering takes place manually. Your grandfather had a terrific memory and knew all of his customers by name, but unfortunately, none of this information is located anywhere in the store. The family recipes for the baked goods and soups are also stored in your grandfather’s memory. Inventory is tracked in a note pad, along with employee payroll, and marketing coupons. The Cafe does not have a Web site, uses very little marketing except word-of-mouth, and essentially still operates the same as it did in 1952.
Business Dilemma
You have recently started selling a few new products including customized CDs, customizable coffee presses, and coffee-of-the-month and tea-of-the-month programs. Each time you develop a new product you are forced to create an entire new system to track sales. You are not sure why the accounting system you purchased forces you to do this, but you are stuck with this system until you can replace it. You quickly notice that separate systems for each different line of business including coffee, tea, CDs, equipment, programs, etc. is going to hurt your business. You notice that each system works independently to perform its job of creating, updating, and maintaining sales information, but you are wondering how you are going to operate the business as a whole.
PROJECT FOCUS:
- Create a list of issues you will encounter if you continue to run the business with separate systems, performing the same operations, for each different product.
- What could happen to the cafe if you cannot correlate the details of each system?
- How could separate systems for each product hurt marketing campaigns?
- Be sure to highlight at least 10 issues where separate systems could cause problems running your business.