2012年9月19日星期三


Case study: Gray Hendrix

Background:
Gray Hendrix is an American company whose business is to provide public transport across America. Its headquarters locates in Dallas and it has thousands of buses and employees to run its business.
However, with the growing business in America, employees in GH wasted a lot of time in searching the bus tables. Meanwhile, the executive of Gray Hendrix could not react to the business information timely since they have to make plan according to the information months ago. Furthermore, two problems increase the operating cost of enterprises: 
1. GH could not avoid the situation that bus outbound without a single client and they fail to take a quick decision dealing with such situation.
2. The bus may stop over 10 times in one track. Since it could not be predicted, the business would be negatively affected by that.

Solution:
For this situation, the company decided to hire a business consulting company to optimize the business process and purchase computer booking ticket system called "Trips".  After the stress testing, "Trips" was deployed in GH and run for about one year and a half. However, "Trips" fails to provide necessary support for the following reasons:
1. Employees in GH could not use "Trips" effectively.
2. "Trips" could not meet the demand of the enterprise, and employees have to input the data by themselves.
3. The information flow generated by "Trips" is not significant enough to support the executive's decision.
4. The high cost of operating this system and the delay of system make the system difficult to use.

Analysis:
I think there are three aspects that attributed to GHs failure:
1.     The executive failed to focus on MIS system, which should be the core system and mainly invested.
2.     GH failed to make detailed plan and mechanism based on Trips. Thus, Trips does not work very well in the GHs business.
3.     GH failed to monitor the software development process. Therefore, Trips functions are not fully developed so that its effect is very limited.


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