1. Describe the mainframe mindset at Toyota U.S.A. and the problems it caused with respect to data and information.

Toyota U.S.A., being one of the world’s leading motor manufacturing industry, differentiates itself from others in sales service and support. Toyota U.S.A, around 10 years back had suffered from a backward IT infrastructure. This component purchases the vehicles from Toyota Japan. This was then resold in the U.S.A. Shipping these and then selling them to the dealers involved finance charge of $8 per day. And on an average delivery time was of nine days. Multiplying that by 2 million cars per year, there was a default loss of nearly $144 million per year.

The problem faced here by this component was that there was manual entry of data about every purchase and sale of the vehicle or the spare parts. This entry was done by the high level officials. Thereby others including the sales and other departments had no access to the data as such. This is nothing but the mainframe mindset. This was like a communication gap, which led to few problems. For example, employees could not gain access to the data and hence could not report as to what the dealers exactly wanted or demanded for. All the entries were single-handedly carried out, thus, it was a time consuming process.

2. Describe the benefits that Toyota U.S.A. received from its data warehouse implementation.

There were few IT solutions which were applied. First, the Toyota Logistics System (TLS) focused on precision tracking and supply chain management. The high level officials could understand the market, thus eliminating the communication gap between the high level officials and the other employees (precision tracking). This ensured that the right cars and the spare parts to the right dealers in a timely fashion.

Data warehouses were implemented for TLS. The information was quite inaccurate here also because of few, precisely three important, problems with this solution. One, human errors got unchecked. Two, transferring files from the old system into the warehouse was quite a problem. Conversion of a legacy system was not possible. Three, the data warehouses required IT professionals to handle, rather than the company executives.

Finally, data warehouse with the dashboard was used. This helped the executives to analyze the business by the dashboard which was used as a stop light. Executives took decisions depending on the stop light. Green indicated good, yellow indicated acceptable but questionable and red indicated danger. Thus the executives would concentrate on the yellow zone in order to improve and invest on the red zone and so on.

Thus, data warehouse which included dashboard helped this component of Toyota a lot, as a result of which, Toyota U.S.A. had increased the volume of cars it handles by 40% in eight years while it increased the number of employees by just 3%.

Toyota U.S.A. had suffered from the bad IT infrastructure about 10 years back. But, now, because of the IT solutions like implementation of data warehouse which includes a dashboard, helped this component. In the long run, the IT solution implemented may help Toyota U.S.A. But they may face challenges if the information system they have may not be compatible with the change in the market that they concentrate on. This means it may require a better information system to handle such issues as well as those handled previously.

VATSAL T DOSHI

1MS07IS111

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Problem: Businesses today have grown exponentially, and with them, there has been a substantial increase in the data produced, stored, manipulated and managed by business organizations worldwide. This data has to be valid, accurate, consistent and relevant to the context in which it has been defined. Today, data are considerably more complex. Companies are required to keep track of a variety of data related to products, financial records, inventory, customer records etc. Unfortunately, many companies assume that their data are accurate. This assumption can be highly inaccurate. The problem lies in maintaining clean and consistent data to enable healthier business transactions.

Question 1: Why are clean data important to Accounting? Finance? Human resources? Production/ Operations? Marketing?

The competition for business has fuelled system complexities. We are clearly in the information age. There is more data being sent around the world today than ever, and this is only going to grow exponentially. To have a competitive edge, today, we have to be able to share clean, accurate data quickly. A business organization’s identity is defined by the product it produces or the service provided by the company. So, it’s very important to maintain an accurate and consistent database to enable a successful venture. Research shows that poor-quality customer data leads to significant costs, such as higher customer turnover, excessive expenses from customer contact processes like mail-outs and missed sales opportunities. But companies are now discovering that data quality has a significant impact on their most strategic business initiatives, not only sales and marketing. Other back-office functions like budgeting, manufacturing and distribution are also affected. The business benefit of clean data and good information management goes far beyond satisfying regulators and can be fundamental to winning and retaining clients and delivering products and services.

How many of us can forget the Satyam scam which shocked our country in January, 2009? The country’s biggest corporate fraud brought upon losses of over Rs.14000 crore to investors. The accounting fraud, which shocked India, came to light on January 7 when Ramalinga Raju quit as Satyam chairman while confessing that he had cooked the company's accounts and inflated profits over several years.The company showed huge cash balances and fixed deposits in several banks of international repute. It was, however, actually starved of funds and the promoters were desperate to raise money to keep the company afloat. It forms a clear case of deliberate maintenance of false data by the company just to show the world that ‘All is well’ within the organization when, in reality it was in financial crisis.
The importance of clean data can be elaborated as follows:

• Accounting: It mainly relates to maintenance of accounting details like the costs incurred, payments made and to balance the credit and debit amounts of an organization and hence the data maintained needs to be valid and accurate.
• Finance: The field of finance deals with the concepts of time, money and risk and how they are interrelated. It also deals with how money is spent and budgeted. It provides a clear indication of the company’s profits and losses. The Satyam scam can be related to this, in the way the company maintained false data. Since it indicates a company’s standing in the society, the data needs to be correct and consistent.
• Human resources: There needs to be sufficient data about the workforce in an organization, as well as a detailed customer database. Companies now track customer’s buying habits, preferences and a host of other data, and irrelevant data, not only affects customer satisfaction, but also has a direct cost on the company concerned.
• Production/Operations: This mainly deals with the manufacturing and sales figures of a product, and plays a major role in determining the demand for a product, its operating costs etc. Incorrect data in these records affects a company’s production.
• Marketing: Marketing decisions are based on data and what that data tells the company, will make its customers respond. People move, change or lose jobs and alter their spending habits quickly these days, and the marketing strategies have to be compliant with the customer’s demands.
  

Question 2: What types of data will have the shortest half life?
I personally believe that data related to the customers of a company have the shortest half life, because they are bound to change frequently. A person’s contact number, address or preferences tend to change with changing situations. I'm sure that all of us have received letters sent to a misspelt name, or where the gender title has been assumed, and has been assumed wrongly.
System data can degrade very rapidly, starting with customer information such as spelling of names, addresses, and missing information. Errors like these will accumulate within days, and in a few weeks the sales figures will no longer make sense. A database that offers any kind of unsecured access can become unreliable-and ultimately worthless within two months.
Often data is collected but not subsequently maintained. An annual review is needed for client and prospect contact data. If the data is not updated, then after a couple of years it will be nearly worthless. Therefore, a complete data cleaning operation will be required.

Sahana. P
1MS07IS085

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1. Is an ELS a knowledge management system? why or why not?

solution: ELS may not be called as a typical knoweledge management system but it can be thought about as an improvised version of a Knoweledge management system.ELS uses various methods to collect the information and interprect different meanings out of it, which is the underlyining fact for the very esistance of any Knowledge Management System.



2. If your company implemented ELS software, would you feel that your privacy could be invaded?

solution: No, absolutely not. when you are working for a company the relationship is contractual. With this type of relationship the company has all privileges to extract maximum work from you. The methodologies used to accomplosish this varies from company to company, in this case ELS is one such methodology used to effectively utilize the available resourses [ in this case its employees]. As long as ELS doesn't break the contractual relationship it does not invade privacy.

SHARATH BABU
1MS07IS092

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Question 1: Why do we need virtual databases?

Answer: Consider a person viewing a list of the musical concert events in one web page. Suppose he wishes to find the cheapest way to attend a concert from his hometowm. He has to copy the data from that page(dates and cities) into other web pages where he can find airfares to those cities on those dates. In fact, he may have to enter the same data into many different pages(for different airlines), along with additional data, such as his hometown. He then has to read and keep track of the best combination of city, date, flight and price.

Consider the case of job hunting on the web. In order to make a meaningful career choice, a job seeker needs information on available opportunities and other related data. Information about job openings is scattered across thousands of different websites-company home pages and newspaper calssifieds sites.

The solution to both these problems is to convert these different data sources into a single virtual database. This data integration in virtual databases allows users to acquire information from different databases and heterogeneous or distributed computer systems. Thus virtual databases are required in key domains such as Employment Classifieds, Consumer Shopping, Real estate, etc.

Question 2: What are the advantages of a virtual databse?

Answer: The advantages of the virtual database are:
-Allows easy integration of various data to get the desired information: Virtual databases provide updated information by integrating data on a need basis.

-Utilizes real time data for real time decision making: Users can obtain real time information instantaneously.

-Reduces time and cost for system development: Data integration in virtual databses allows users to reduce the time and cost for system building as well as providing a flexible system development environment.

-Reduces the effort in management of conventional databases.

-A highly flexible,understandable data saving organisation that has the capability of any development can be created.

Sai Janaki Tejaswi P
-1MS07IS087

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problem:
>Diageo a British company has eight priority brands like Smirnoff Vodka, Johnie Walker Scotch..etc.
>For marketing these spirits they need the data like age,income and other data about customers,tied to records of the volume of sales of different products to promote the product.
>But in United States there are certain state regulations which vary from state to state and prevents them from making their right promotions better.
>which will result in less data regarding monthly data on sales,volume and profitability on different brands and overnight sales.

Question 1:Describe how state regulations interfere with Diageo's data collection?
solution:Diageo had to follow state regulations of United States like..
>They were supposed to have direct sales only to distributors,unlike in Europe where they were selling directly to retailers.
>This led to lack of data regarding sales information overnight.
>It had to depend on third party to get the sales information because they were having information what they have sold to distributors and not from the retailers which they need to have for right promotions.
>They were receiving retail data only once a month which was not sufficient for them.

Question 2:What types of data will Diageo need on a daily basis, and what types of data will it need only on a monthly basis?
Solution:
1.On a daily basis the company needs overnight sales information from retailers.
2.On a monthly basis it needs data on sales,volume and profitability on different brands and how well the product is selling at Irish Pubs,fine restaurants or retail stores

BY:
SALMAN BAIG A
1MS07IS089

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Synder's of Hanover, one of the top players in pretzel industry had to change the way financial data was collected and analyzed in the company due to unavailability of detailed view of the information collected from financial data.

Problem:

In the earlier process, the financial analyst had to collect excel spreadsheets from different department heads scattered worldwide and organise it in another excel spreadsheet. The final spreadsheet document acted as a defacto monthly Profit-Loss statement for the company. The situation became worse at the end of each fiscal quarter because the reports generated were of no use for generating year end PL statement. Any corrections would require the spreadsheets to be sent to the department and the analyst had to wait for the resubmission of the spreadsheets.The officials complained of not getting information available to them immediately in an efficient and detailed level.

Solution:

The company came up with an idea of discarding its paper based system and using proCube to collect and organise the data in a manageable way with more detail and the best part was that it still made use of excel spreadsheets so there was not much problem incorporating it in the company.

keeping this in mind, the following questions are answered:

1. What were the business advantages of using proCube software? Can you think of any other advantages that Synder's of Hanover might realize in future?

Ans. The business advantages from the the usage of the product are as follows:

i. The company had a cut in the labor costs involved in creating reports.

ii. The company was able to identify flop products that did not click in the market and did not generate enough sales compared to the popular ones.

The other advantages that Synders might realize in future is the ability of proCube to be integrated with a datawarehouse that can be used instead of excel spreadsheets to store data collected from different departments.

2. Other than finance and accounting, what other areas did the proCube software impact? Describe each one.

Ans. Apart from finance and accounting, the major areas where proCube had a huge impact were Production and Distribution.

Production:

The proCube software enables the company to keep track of the products being sold more and products that did not meet up. This information enables the executive head to decide upon as to how much quantity of a product has to produced. If customers are not buying a particular product the company can reduce the production of that product.

Distribution:

With the PL statements generated by the proCube software the company was able to get detailed information about the stores where certain products were sold more in comparison to other products. This enables the distribution of products to the stores in a appropriate manner so that the hit product gets distributed widely and sales can increase.

In the end i would like to conclude that since the pretzel consumers are increasing day by day and the snack industry as a whole continues to boom. Now the question arises that can a family owned organization like Synder's of Hanover compete against big corporate players such as Fritolay. Well, the company has taken a wise step of incorporating a business strategy through IT by making use of proCube and has been able to survive and compete in the market against players like Fritolay.

By:

Satchidanand Das

1MS07IS090

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have sufficient ability to know what it knew which resulted in what affected the whole world, the attack on WTC. Yet years after the attacks, the FBI is still unable to electronically share investigative information among its agents that could help it solve crimes and stop terrorist plots. The bureau thought of designing a new information system that would connect all agents via a reliable network and make investigative information available at real time.But the failure of VCF (Virtual case file system) led a loss of $170 million and the FBI is left with an incomplete source code.

There were a lot of reasons that led to the failure of the system such as poor designing, lack of management and improper delegation to software vendors. As a result four years of work and $170 million were wasted and the FBI’s requirements are still unmet.

Questions 1: Is four years too long to wait on a project? How FBI could have limited expense and wasted time on this project?

Ans: In my opinion four years is not a long time to wait for a project of such utter importance. But again the urgency of developing such a system post the 9/11 attacks should not be overlooked. In simple terms the faster you receive information the faster you can solve the case and also prevent crime. Generally time assurance cannot be guaranteed on developing information systems because of the evolving technology and other factors involved in making information systems such as the users, the infrastructure. So in my opinion waiting for four years was a huge risk taken by FBI because in such critical conditions what was required was immediate action towards counter-terrorism.

FBI could have limited expense and time wasted on this project by proper planning and coming up a minimal set of requirements rather than giving a 800 page set of system requirements that proved to be a havoc for the system developers.

Question 2: What should the FBI do now? Buy the commercial package? Start a new in-house development project?

Ans: The FBI should not waste time developing the project rather should go for buying the commercially available package and try to deploy it as soon as possible before any more attacks occur. Until the system is up and running the FBI has to continue with its paper records and inefficient software that the VCF was supposed to replace. The bottom line is when security is the major concern you cannot take chances and wait for the best you have to do the best with what you have got.

Posted by:

Priyonath Banerjee.

1MS06IS051

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