Healthlite Yogurt Company Case Study

HEALTHLITE YOGURT COMPANY

1. Overview of organization

Structure: Healthlite Yogurt Company is a US market leader in yogurt and health related products, with corporate headquarters located in Danbury, Connecticut. Healthlite has 20 sales regions, each with approximately 30 sales representatives. Healthlite has a 12 person marketing grout at corporate headquarters.

Products: Yogurt and related health products and new yogurt based products which would include frozen desserts and low-fat salad dressings.

Major Business Processes for Sales: Requires sales persons to write up hard-copy tickets to place orders through the mail or by fax.

Major Business Processes for Marketing: From basic sales and invoice data, an organization can product a variety of reports with valuable information to guide sales and marketing work. This does not

Major Business Processes for Order Processing: When sales persons turn in order, the order information is transferred every evening from the mainframe to a microcomputer at each of Healthlite's processing sites. The daily orders specifies the total yogurt and yogurt product demand for each processing center, which is then processed and shipped out. Due to the growth of new products, for each order, as salesperson filled out at least two forms per account.

2. Problems

What are Healthlite's problems?

Healthlite does not have good information technology in an effort to communicate what is going on in the organization with sales, marketing, order processing, inventory, etc.

Communication between sales manager sand sales representative has been primarily through mail or by telephone. Healthlite needs to have better processes for communicating other than by telephone or mail. This does not work in a fast-paced society and if communications are slow, sales are going to be slow.

Sales persons are not allowed to review data on any other customers other than their own. If a sales person has an excess of one product because one of his customers cancelled an order at the last minute, by allowing him to review the entire customer base, he might be able to sell his inventory to a customer who is in need of the product.

Each salesperson is able to store and retrieve data for assigned customer accounts using a terminal in the regional office linked to the corporate mainframe. Each salesperson should have access to all the information having to do with customer accounts.

Sometimes the only way to receive timely information is for the managers to make telephone calls to subordinates and then piece the information together. There is a need for better systems so that the manager can just look up this information with the creation of a quick report instead of piecing the information together. What happens if the manager is missing some pieces of information which he did not realize existed? The report is then meaningless.

Sales representatives have