Assessment task details and instructions

AlphaCo is a medium-sized company that produces high-quality handmade furniture for customers in their own country. Most of these customers are small boutique furniture retailers who have used AlphaCo for a number of years, normally placing orders by telephone and paying by cash on delivery.

There is little visibility of future orders, which means that the lead time for delivery can be over four weeks, and this means that some orders are cancelled at short notice due to changes in customer demand. Although AlphaCo has a strong brand image, it has seen the market for its products reduced by nearly 30% over the last year, as consumers react to the increasing rate of inflation and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Currently, AlphaCo relies on a small number of local suppliers for their raw materials (woods, plastics, etc) and struggles to maintain effective relationships due to their difficulty in managing the supply and demand of their own products.

AlphaCo has recently appointed a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) who can see future opportunities in competing in global, more price-sensitive markets. This will require a change in strategy to one that focuses on the efficiency of production and the development of stronger and more professional customer and supplier relationships.

A new focus will be needed to improve AlphaCo’s manufacturing, marketing, and supply chain capabilities and capacity. The CEO is prepared to invest significantly in making these changes, particularly through digital transformation, as its initial market research shows that there is a sizeable market for quality products, but costs need to be managed effectively and efficiently.

Your task

You are a technical consultant and have been appointed by the CEO to review AlphaCo’s operations and information management processes and ways of working. This review takes the form of a report that includes the different tasks shown below with mark weightings against each one.

Develop a SWOT analysis of the current situation at AlphaCo (10 marks).
Based on your SWOT analysis, discuss how a more effective and efficient management of capacity, quality and both suppliers and customers could help AlphaCo meet its new performance objectives (40 marks).
Select one of the process areas from part 2 (e.g. capacity, quality, supplier or customer management) and, using Business Process Model (BPM) techniques, develop and present two BPM models that show how these could be improved by capturing the existing and the proposed business processes (20 marks).
Conduct research into a suitable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution and develop an evaluation table, which shows a set of evaluation characteristics and the analysis of two commercial/off-the-shelf products and two Open Source Software alternatives (20 marks).
Select one Industry 4.0 technology and discuss the benefits of implementing this into AlphaCo (10 marks).

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