This case study is about IMT Custom Machine Company, INC. (CMC) which is subsidiary company of the International Machine and Tool-USA (IMT-USA). IMT passed through number of mergers and acquisitions throughout its history of operations. The production of the company was very high in mid-1970s, but then in the next twenty years it went down and by the 1995, it was very low and as a result some drastic changes were required, especially in the organization of the information system (IS) across the company. The company had two main plants which were under the control of the June: one was in Chicago, Illinois and other was at Fort Wayne, Indiana. The company produced very sophisticated and state of the art custom machines and it had very professional engineers, designers and software developers, but the problem was that there was no coordination among them and they were split into two groups engineering system (ES) and management information system (MIS). Similarly, there was lack of connectivity between the information system of Chicago and mainframe at the Fort Wayne which was affecting the performance of the company. The company was still using local area network (LAN) in different departments instead of wide area network (WAN) which is more sophisticated and share information among different departments more robustly. Similarly, there was no backup in case of computer system failure and people use paper systems and scheduling information and test details were done by hand instead of computer. If anyone had problem he was just using local software made by the company engineer’s instead of using more sophisticated and efficient software. In short, there were several problems in the company which were contributing to the decrease production of the machines and immediate attention is required to solve these problems.

June Page was working in the CMCI and she had 18 years of versatile experience in the custom machine making companies. In 1999, she was appointed as the Vice President of the CMCI. The two production facilities one in Chicago, IL and another in Fort Wayne, Indiana were under her control and she was also responsible for the third facility which provides spare parts to the main production facilities. Her main role was to uplift the production of the company and create an organizational environment that allows all IMT-USA’s employees to work more coherently and uniformly. In order to develop strong company culture for the CMCI a clear vision and strategy is required to foresee the real issues going on in the company especially, with the information system of the company. Though June Page had no experience of the information system, but she has ability to find out the problems and to take drastic steps to implement changes that should be required for the prosperity of the company. Page decided to find out what are potential problems in the company. So, she asked senior engineer Charles Browning to point out the problems and potential solutions for those problems. Charles Browning was staff engineer in the company and he had extensive computing background. He did six week investigation, and then come up with the four plausible solutions for the ongoing computing problems in the company.

The first solution was moving towards more centralization and removing existing work stations such as Sun and IBM. This change would free up the mainframe, but company would require spending more money to buy new software which would be used by number of users at same time and funds are also required to relocate CAD workstations from one place to other and

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if this system failed it would definitely cost a lot of money to the company. The second solution is to improve workstation computing. It would help to spread out information to all work stations, and it would be connected to one common network, but the problem associated with this change was that current staff had no knowledge of distributed computing and new staff would be required to deal with this system and new applications might be required to deal with the new system. The third solution provided by the Charlie was introduction of the Linux based system which is connected to data hosting company instead of the centralized mainframe system. This system is portable and could be used on many different machines and company had no need to invest money to buy new hardware but instead would only pay to the off-site data company. The main drawback of this change would be that the company will place sensitive data in the hands of other company. The fourth recommendation is wait and watch policy. In this policy company would wait and see what development would be happened in the future and specific system changes will applied only if required in the future. On the other hand, company is already using wait and watch policy and it could hurt the business in the long run if they will not evolve its information system with time.

I think there are pros and cons associated with each solution provided by the Charlie and it would not be easy to implement any change immediately because it could cause disruption in the normal functioning of the plant. Therefore, I would suggest implementing combination of solutions provided by him and those changes can be implemented gradually and cautiously that normal production of the plant would not effect during implementation of those changes. The company should decrease its dependence on the mainframe because it is not fulfilling the technological requirements of the company therefore it should consider to move towards computed workstation environment which would be more integrated and spread out information to all work station. Similarly, along with this Linux system should be used. Even though in this system off site data company would be involved, but this is only solution to make information technology system of the company more efficient and productive. Linux system is not expensive to install and rebooting is not required quite often in Linux system. The Linux system is quite easy and fast to install (Haas, n.d.). Similarly, WAN should be used instead LAN to connect the workstation. A WAN is an advanced version of a LAN, developed to increase efficiency of communication between people of different geographical regions. Internet is an example of WAN while LAN is computer present in any office. The cost of the WAN is quite low even though it is much faster than the LAN (Walton, n.d.). Company should hire professional people for the improvement of the information system in the company. These are the suggestions which could be used by the company to improve its information system and company should not adapt wait and watch policy because company’s production is already going down and it’s time to take bold steps which would be beneficial for the company in the future. It would help company to cope with the challenges posed by evolution in the information system and to compete with the other competitors in the market.

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References

Haas, J. (n.d.). Linux, the Ultimate Unix. Retrieved June13, 2014, from http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/a/linux.htm.

Walton, A. (n.d.). The Advantages of a WAN Over a LAN. Retrieved June 12, 2014, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-wan-over-lan-70852.html.