Question: Instructions for your tutor: Please read the case study and based on that complete chart below. Case Study - Haliburton Gardens Haliburton Gardens (HG) started

Instructions for your tutor:

Please read the case study and based on that complete chart below.

Case Study - Haliburton Gardens

Haliburton Gardens (HG) started out as a fruit and vegetable stand. Agnes Black loved gardening and spent her summers cultivating her large garden plot, canning and preserving her hard work to help feed her family of 12 children. As the children grew up and moved away, Agnes kept up her gardens and started selling her leftover fruits and vegetables in a stand at the end of her driveway. Cottagers travelling back and forth from Toronto to cottage country would stop and stock up. Agnes' son, John, realizing the business potential, leased fields in the neighbouring farm, built some greenhouses and started planting!

HG opened their flagship store outside of Havelock, ON in 1987, their second store in Bala, ON in 1995 and their third store in Orillia, ON in 2006. The business is owned by John Black and managed my John's children. John is supposed to be retired, but he loves participating in the communities where is stores are located, serving as a spokesperson for the HG brand. Head office and warehouse for HG is on the same property as their flagship store and HG owns and leases farms in the Haliburton area with fields for crops and greenhouses. Aside from organically grown vegetables, HG has expanded into the far more lucrative home dcor market.

Each store hires and schedules their own staff. Employees are paid bi-weekly. HG uses the services of an outside payroll company to manage their payroll, so each store sends a summary of employee payroll data to the payroll company at the end of the pay period. HG also employs head office staff, warehouse staff and gardening staff. Head office staff is hired scheduled by head office management, the warehouse manager hires and schedules warehouse staff and farm staff is hired and scheduled by the farm managers. Head office staff manage payroll data for the head office, warehouse and farm staff.

Store Inventory is usually managed centrally by head office staff. HG has a warehouse and purchasers work tirelessly ensuring that the warehouse is stocked with enough inventory to meet projected customer demands. Forecasts are prepared one season ahead and purchasers negotiate contracts with suppliers and order products as required. Warehouse staff make certain that nothing is received in the warehouse without having been purchased first, so they take care to match inventory receipts with purchase orders! The warehouse contains cold rooms and freezers to store product from the farms and from suppliers. Inventory purchased by head office purchasing staff is paid for by head office accounting staff. Staff adhere to inventory accounting principles in the warehouse ensuring that even the disposal of 'past-due' products are disposed of.

Each of HG's stores has it's own 'personality'. The store managers work with local artisans purchasing their products and organizing inviting displays. Store managers work with head office to create product forecasts, one season ahead and request transfer of stock from the central warehouse as their inventory levels drop. Store managers pay bills that are specific for their store. Although store management tries to follow inventory accounting principles, the nature of a retail business makes this difficult and for that reason, staff is continuously cycle counting inventory, disposing of past-due product and recording product that has 'gone missing'. Store managers pay the bills for all purchases made locally.

The Research Farm is one of John's pet projects and is run by his daughter, Anne (doctorate in Botany). Anne looks to design trends and tries to cultivate plants and trees that are hard to grow in our Canadian climate. Anne also experiments with the latest hydroponic ideas to see how HG can grow product and flowers with less resources. HG farms utilize techniques developed by the Research Farm and maintain strict bio security procedures in the greenhouses. Farm Managers purchase seed and supplies directly from suppliers, after head office staff have negotiated contracts. Farm managers do keep a stock pile of frequently purchased items in their green houses. Eventually, Anne would like to provide customers seed to harvest material for fruits, vegetables and plants. To start with, Anne's team assigns a unique identifier to each batch of seeds and that information is kept with the resulting inventory of plants all the way through the transfer process to the warehouse and then the stores.

Sales are recorded using the newly installed point of sale system. Dennis, the Information Technology Manager and his staff had quite a time connecting the new technology to the existing Store Management system that was installed just in time for Y2K! Uploads and downloads between the two systems are done at night which does slow down management decision making. Aside from managing IT related service requests, Dennis also manages the service teams that maintain HG's fleet of farm and warehouse equipment. Any service requests that Dennis's team can't resolve are outsourced to local small engine repair shops, local computer repair shops or suppliers.

HG's engaging website allows customers to look at products and place orders. Every morning, office staff retrieve the web orders and enter them into the system assigning the order to closest store. HG has a list of preferred delivery companies that they like to work with.

Recent World Health events have shifted HG's business model. Stores had to close and employees were laid off. HG had to rely on their website to generate sales traffic, offering lots of sales on products with a short shelf life. The sales worked and although stores are not able to open, customer traffic on the website has remained constant.

Prior to 2019, HG was considering opening another location in the GTA, but now have decided to invest in a new store management system that integrates with their newly purchased point of sale system. The new system must allow for a centralized approach to processing online orders and connect to the current website so that orders don't have to be entered twice. They would like to invest properly now in a system that will work for many years and provide flexibility and reliability for the foreseeable future.

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