Problem Management Case Study: Vermont Teddy Bear

The main problem, in this case, is involving Vermont Teddy Bear which was John Sortino in 1981 is that the companies point of sale system was severely lagging behind. In 2011, The company struggled with major surges in customer periods, for example, Valentine's day and Christmas Eve this occurred because of VTB's intricate middleware system. The issue may have happened because instead of revamping it's system during down periods the company attempted to do patch work jobs over time. This is quite alarming because a major retailer would not have these types of issues with the system when they need it most. Which leads to the next point of the IT supervisor being faced with a dilemma on what to improve prior to the next surge period(Mother's

Doing research during the lesser holidays like Mother's day would be beneficial. This can be accomplished through data collection and data mining through a data warehouse and an analysis of the data that can recognize spending trends for customers and target those customers as valued customers and prioritized as such. Implementing this method would alleviate most of the surge day pressure. The data can be analyzed in conjunction with statistics to get an idea of when demand will increase and when to start capacity planning to use as a contingency plan.

Of all these alternative I would recommend the data mining solution. There's a phrase floating around that states knowing is half the battle." If the people in charge are able to pinpoint exactly when they will have high customer intake based on previous data then the staff can be better prepared to handle the extreme influx. That way weeks or days in advance the IT department can prepare by conducting maintenance on the system to make sure it's in optional condition to handle any

Or, then again perhaps, VTB can use the CRM structure to discover about better customer advantage, deliberately pitching, and market designs. According to Bang (2005) CRM is viewed as an educated business philosophy to make and keep up whole deal customer associations. For example, CRM system would be an enabling specialist of business comes about like future repeat purchases. VTB's should use the CRM as a focus business methodology to robotize customer advantage. All things considered, customers tend to put orchestrate at long last and expect the package passed on time. Henceforth, on the operational side, data must be gotten, fused, arranged and fulfilled, to satisfy its targets (Bang 2005). The operational viability of the CRM structure is to accumulate the data from customer to be deciphered later on to