ABC manufacturing has experienced some ups and downs in their business. They are in the market for 10 years founded in 2010, and in the first four years they had a steady growth year over year of 25% in their revenues. That is a fast growth. They started in Florida but quickly spread out to Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Alabama.

They manufacture safety equipment, including helmets, boots, traffic cones, special safety signs, gloves, special overalls, having very different products in their production base. After the first four years, they started to have good and not that good years, sometimes growing and sometimes declining their sales compared to the previous year. In general terms for their 10 years, they have grown their presence.

In 2015 they decided to expand to Mexico, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and El Salvador. Their IT systems and processes were not updated to support this expansion, particularly considering that they expanded too fast into too many countries.

The company management decided that the organization needed faster decision-making, easier access to engineering designs, more control of manufacturing, tighter integration with logistics, better product sheets, deliver their products faster and support their customer base more effectively. Some of the problems that they have today, particularly experiencing the growth to foreign markets.

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the questions

- They need to improve their product design process. They have a team in Miami and another team in Atlanta. These teams need to work more collaboratively in ideas, plans, creating of documents, version control.

- They need to integrate their sales teams with their customers. One idea was to give ipads or tablets to their sales people so they could close sales right there with the client, not missing a sale. There is a debate between using or not using Mac platform. They have a current old version of Microsoft running in the company.

- The manufacturing processes need more automation, and at the same time they need to collect more data about their processes, defects. They need to improve integration of their workstations and create more collaboration among teams.

- There is a growing suspicion that there are some product plans and ideas / sketches that may have been shared with some competitors. Recently their new line of helmets, not yet launched, had a similar product in the market before them. Management was not clear about what to do.

- The current IT manager and its team are considering alternatives to improve collaboration, make their users experience with systems better, faster, easier, improving collaboration, controlling better the documentation, make them more accessible, at create an internal site (intranet) where people could work better. Also they need to integrate with some external vendors and providers, particularly materials, transportation companies, legal services, specialized IT and training companies.

- IT Security has also been a challenge in general and their current internal data center to support the increasing volume of data and documents.

They have never used the cloud before, all applications were hosted internally. After a year of discussions, the management team decided to move to the cloud and selected Office 365 as their key platform to manage their business.