Question

Why did the Energy Telematics project fail and why was Joel's tram vaught off guard by the hostile reaction of the truck drivers at the Omaha depot?

MINI CASE Working Smarter at Continental Furniture International Joel Parsons hurried down the hall to the monthly executive committee meeting doing a mental checklist of all the things he was responsible for: sales analysis-check; mar keting stats-check; quarterly and YTD financials-check; operating statistics-check trends in each of these areas-check. Parsons was right hand man to the President of Continental Furniture International (CFI) and his primary job was to collect, analyze, and interpret any and all information the president needed to run the company.de had joined CFI a year ago from a similar job as manager of Data Analysis, assisting the vice president of Operations at UPS, where he had been involved in implementing some of the world's most sophisticated delivery scheduling and package flow technol. ogy. "I could use a bright young MBA here with me to shake things up at CFI," the president, Alan Chambers, had told him during his interview. "We need better business intelligence if we're going to be better than our competition." "That was a laugh," thought Joel as he took his place beside Chambers and flipped open his laptop. These days his lived on Excel. This company thrived on its spread sheets and Joel was responsible for digesting everyone else's data and packaging it for the President so he was always up to speed. Sure, they also had computer reports and even a financial "dashboard," thanks to the company's new ERP system, but the busi- ness world was changing and these canned reports only scratched the surface of what the president needed to know The next hour was a typical executive meeting, with each VP reporting on his or her progress and the president grilling them on exactly what was going on. To keep everyone on their toes, he always liked to have a few facts at his fingertips. At this meeting, there seemed to be a theme. "How much do we spend to heat our Andover warehouse?," he inquired of the VP of Operations. "Why are our delivery costs rising so quickly?" "What are we doing to make sure our drivers are following all our safety protocols?" Occasionally, he would turn to Joel to check a fact or a trend, but he had done his homework and wanted everyone to know it. Joel watched the VPs squirm with discomfort as they tried to dig through their own spreadsheets to find the informa- tion Alan was demanding. As they moved through the agenda, Joel was happy he wasn't on the hot seat. The last to report was the CIO, Cheryl Drewry. A long-serving executive, Drewry was tough, spoke her mind, and delivered what she promised; it was the reason she'd been arou so long. After listening to Cheryl's report on the progress of their major IT projects, Alan paused and all heads looked up expectantly. Smith, H. A., and J. D. McKeen. "Working Smarter at Continental Furniture Interational" #1--10-10 Queen's School of Business, February 2005. Reproduced by permission of Queen's University School Business, Kingston, Ontario 228

Answer 1

The Energy Telematics project failed or had hit a major obstacle primarily because the most important stakeholders in this project which are the drivers of the truck who are responsible for transportation on ground were not taken into confidence about this project. So as a result of this, they were not aware of the project objectives or deliverables and became skeptical when the pilot run was done.

Due to their misgivings, they threatened to strike and this could have potentially disrupted the regular operations of the company and hence any telematics or operations improvement project derailed at this point since the basic operational flow itself was threatened.

May be Joel was caught offguard and could not anticipate the truck driver's behaviour since he had primarily worked at the corporate office and was relatively new to the organization. So he was not tuned to the sensitivities that truck drivers had and since he had not discussed the project with line managers or operations staff, the feedback element was missing from the project.