Problems at IFG

IFG is a food retail company that used to have limited online presence and marketing tactics until it decided to upgrade their online presence and venture into social media sites like Facebook and YouTube to gain an audience for the launch of their new line of products “nature glow”. But, their lead rival, Grocer’s Products Limited has launched mobile applications, enabling them to reach more of their customer base than IFG, who have their reach limited to online presence. Their online presence has helped them to reach out to customers, but that’s not enough as GPL has been one step ahead of them in gaining more business through online marketing.

The data organization at IFG is very poor, and the data lines are a mess, which can be proven by the fact that there is poor stock management. Some of the employees believe that a product is in stock eve when it is at the back room, or when it is at the distribution hub. Also, there are only two employees who are given the responsibility of sorting out the data organization in the whole enterprise, which might not be sufficient. The systems used are old and outdated and are referred to as “dinosaur” by Josh. The executives at IFG are demanding more customer data, but that seems like an impossibility with the existing system at hand.

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Identifying the Stakeholders

The minds at IFG need to come together to identify the stakeholders in the business. As evident by a conversation, not all the employee in the company are equal in participating. This can be further strengthened by the fact that some of the members are not accessible in the times of a crisis. Furthermore, IFG needs a new reporting system, as the existing ones are old and had been there for a long time. As Tonya pointed out, a new system should be implemented to identify the stakeholders, who can be an asset to the business. John conducting meetings with various personnel and employees to find out innovative ideas can be one of those methods. Using cloud data storage by replacing a traditional one can also help in reducing the overall costs, as the budget at IFG is not very high. As suggested by Tonya, team meeting should be conducted so that ideas can be pooled together.

Enabling IFG to leverage key business problem

IFG needs to use up the data warehouse that was built two years ago by Mark and his team. This will save them a significant amount of cost, as well as save their time of building a new data centre. As discussed earlier, cloud databases can be used instead of traditional data processing system, which can only be operated by a few handfuls of trained professionals. This can cause heavy workload on those professionals, and there are only two of them present who can handle the system as well as handle the excel worksheets. Cloud will enable the data to be viewed and analyzed across multiple systems with multiple users, who can contribute their ideas towards it.

With the development of smartphone applications, many businesses have been able to connect to a broader consumer base, as smartphones are widely used these days. Many people around the globe use Although their presence in social media has given them some leverage; it is still not enough to compete with GPL. For this, IFG needs to develop a smartphone-friendly user interface on its websites and upgrade them on a regular basis. Also, the data which is already present in the system should be made available to the employees, so that it can be further processed and used further for case studies and studying market patterns