Soma Bay and the Cloud ERP systems
The key issue in this case study is the challenge of political upheavals, foreign exchange volatility and economic conditions brought about by the Arab Spring, which has led to the operational decline of Soma Bay as a resort community and vacation paradise in Egypt. ERP systems have the potential to allow the company to effectively react to downturns through close monitoring of costs and operations, using systems such as the JD Edwards Enterprise One ERP Oracle System Suite, to mitigate the operational challenges created by a fall in the tourism sector’s revenue of over 1.3 billion USD. This enables Soma Bay to effectively manage its data processing and operations requirements, including the creation of cash flow reports, accounts receivable charts, facility management reports and KPI reports.
The ERP model was critical for Soma Bay as it enabled the company to be equipped with a level of agility in responding to business shocks, and to identify key areas that would help to foster greater profitability and growth in the overall operations of Soma Bay.
However, there are a number of key challenges associated with the adoption of an ERP platform. Foremost, the employees of Soma Bay may resist the use of the ERP system, as they may consider the ERP system to be unwieldy, bureaucratic and difficult to use. Furthermore, Soma Bay employees may generally struggle with the new processes and requirements from the ERP system, and may not be able to use the system to increase their efficiency and productivity.
There is, however, a significant degree of utility to the use and deployment of the JD Edwards Enterprise One ERP Oracle System Suite as an ERP. This includes the ability to have a bird’s-eye view of data retrieval, cash flows, growth drivers and capital asset management, as well as a real-time access module to all existing financial, operational and supply chain flows. Ultimately, should Soma Bay be able to effectively tap on the utility and potential of the ERP, the company will be able to set itself up effectively for digital transformation and success.
Nasty Gal, Social Media Marketing and Analysis of Key Issues
The case of Nasty Gal demonstrates the significant potential that social media marketing provides to a small business. Sophia Amoruso was clearly able to scale her fashion business from the eBay Nasty Gal Vintage store effectively, and to operate in a swift and efficient manner to ensure that Nasty Gal was able to scale quickly. Furthermore, the use of growth marketing techniques on social marketing channels and a strong attentiveness to customer feedback helped Nasty Gal to scale quickly.
However, the key challenge faced by Nasty Gal was its inability to use management information systems and social media marketing to both open up the sales funnel and to retain customers in an effective and scalable manner. Nasty Gal’s expansion was supported by high levels of expenditure on marketing and advertising, and fueled by venture capital, but was unable to keep pace in terms of its capital use efficiency. Furthermore, Nasty Gal’s customers were dissatisfied with product quality, and the actual market for the company’s products quickly saturated. Finally, the company’s management team failed to effectively use capital, and spent on large office headquarters real estate (a 50,300 square foot location), alongside a dedicated 500,000-square foot fulfillment centre for in-house distribution and logistics management, which led to significant cost overruns and debt for in-house production and distribution.
Nasty Gal should have clearly professionalized their management, social media marketing and supply chain, and stayed lean in their overall operations and management approach. This would have increased their capital efficiency, and would have allowed Nasty Gal to continue to provide appealing and quality merchandise to a niche market that would have appreciated their overall business value proposition. Finally, Nasty Gal should have also scaled at a more appropriate pace, and avoided burning itself out with overly rapid business expansion.
Self-driving cars and automated car driving issues
Self-driving cars represent a significant array of advantages, but also present a number of operational and legal issues.
Foremost, self driving cars would allow for a lower rate of car crashes (up to 90% lower in some estimates), and can optimize transportation systems to allow for more efficient transportation times, shorter transportation journeys, higher fuel efficiency, a smaller carbon footprint, and lower rates of car crashes. The use of internet of things networks and integrated systems for self driving cars could also lead to greater traffic efficiency by optimizing travel routes at a network and system level, which would also reduce the degree of traffic jams and gridlocks in high density areas. Constant speed levels optimized in the self driving car will also lower the braking and acceleration of these cars, leading to greater fuel efficiency and passenger comfort.
However, self driving cars do pose a number of latent operation and security issues. Foremost, in the event of a car crash or harm to a pedestrian from a self driving car, legal liability becomes an issue, as liability attribution would not be clear, given that the car passenger, company and driver would all have some degree of liability. Displacement of driver jobs and high costs for self driving cars may also worsen income inequality.
Finally, self driving cars are connected to a wireless internet network, and may thus have the potential to be hacked by malicious third party actors, and thus be vulnerable to potential sabotage, through coordinated collisions. Finally, self driving car companies have yet to rule out the potential for machine errors, which may lead to significant inconveniences and harms such as wrong routes or harm to pedestrians. These factors thus need to be considered in the form of an operational and legal regulatory framework for the operation of self driving cars.
Human resources and the potential of the new People Data Central portal
The key issue in the Anthem case study is that the old human resources management system was fragmented and unconsolidated, and the individual spreadsheets were arrayed in a highly uncoordinated and messy fashion. This made it difficult for Anthem employees to readily access data and information required to fulfill various human resource functions.
Implementing the Anthem People Data Central as a cloud platform would thus allow for an integrated view of human resource intelligence, drawing from both proprietary internal data as well as third party source data. Human resource directors and managers would thus be able to draw on such data to understand trends related to employee performance, productivity and turnover, and ensure that employees are able to more effectively contribute to the overall mission of the company, and to be compensated in a fair and data-driven manner. This includes the ability to have a bird’s-eye view of human resource data retrieval, income flows, growth drivers and human capital asset management, as well as a real-time access module to all existing financial, operational and human resource trends.
However, there are a number of concerns that should be addressed in the implementation of the new People Data Central Portal. Foremost, employee resistance should be overcome through adequate onboarding of key stakeholders, such as human resource directors and managers.
Secondly, adequate security protocols for both the software and employee levels should be implemented to prevent potential breaches of sensitive and confidential human resource data.
Finally, periodic evaluations of the operational readiness of the system should be conducted to ensure that data fed into the system is kept accurate and up to date.
References
Badue, C., Guidolini, R., Carneiro, R. V., Azevedo, P., Cardoso, V. B., Forechi, A., & De Souza, A. F. (2021). Self-driving cars: A survey. Expert Systems with Applications, 165, 113816.
Jiang, K., Lepak, D. P., Han, K., Hong, Y., Kim, A., & Winkler, A. L. (2012). Clarifying the construct of human resource systems: Relating human resource management to employee performance. Human resource management review, 22(2), 73-85.
Nielsen, T. A. S., & Haustein, S. (2018). On sceptics and enthusiasts: What are the expectations towards self-driving cars?. Transport policy, 66, 49-55.
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