THE CASE
The Tea Collection began in 2002 as a children’s clothing wholesaling company. The masterminds behind the business, Emily Meyer and Leigh Rawdon, each bring a different quality/strength to the business. Emily the designer and Leigh the entrepreneur both understand the importance of IT in their company and continue to utilize new software to help their business grow. Nearly ten years later, the business is going strong with their leadership, ranked on the Inc Magazine list of fastest growing private companies five years in a row (Laudon, 2014).
One of the technologies The Tea Collection’s sales team is using is Geo-Mapping Software. The program they use allows their team to identify and target new prospects. They are able to easily find regions that are not already over saturated with similar wholesalers. The software is equipped with color coding capabilities that allow the sales team to label different types of opportunities as well as where competitors and their current stores are located.
Even with all of these great technologies issues do sometimes arise. Leigh shared, -The biggest challenges with technologies is integration. So that you have multiple systems and when they don’t integrate automatically then your depending on people to make those connections and that can take a lot of time- (BNET Video, 2009). It is not only important to have systems integrated but also departments. Many times there is different terminology, acronyms and processing within one company. These inconsistencies cause major problems when firms ask questions that span multiple systems or multiple subunits, thwarting their ability to make coordinated, organization-wide responses to today’s business problems (Goodhue, 1992). By having systems that are fully integrated business owners are able to lower overhead and function in an efficient manner.
QUESTIONS:
1. Suggest 5 key software applications used by the Tea collection ?
(under each key write how it will be helpful or useful in this particular application or software)
2. Q3: Do you believe this company can continue to grow rapidly with the existing software and hardware they have demonstrated in this case? Why yes or why not?
(whether yes or no you have to explain deeply your point with three valued reasons)
