The Fields' organization grew at an extremely rapid pace. With more than 400 stores and 8000 employees worldwide, the company recognized a need for information technology in order to grow and to manage the business, and most importantly for Debbi Fields, for quality control. With so many operations, without the use of IT, it would be virtually impossible to monitor, communicate and ensure over 400 stores focused on the customer and were ran in the same way Debbi Fields ran her original Palo Alto store.
Because Mrs. Fields followed a philosophy of making the customer happy and viewed each store as an extension of her Palo Alto store, the implementation of information technology was deemed necessary. The Fields' believed that managers needed to focus on people tasks. By allowing the machine to adopt more tasks, the store manager could focus les
...s on paperwork and focus on the important task of selling cookies.
IT was used at Mrs. Fields to ensure this was done on a daily basis through the store personal computers, financial and sales systems, and the telecommunications equipment. By use of these systems, tracking the financial performance of each store, scheduling, marketing support, hourly sales projections, and even human resources tasks were made possible through IT, and therefore freed manager's time. Instead of focusing on the daunting daily tasks of planning, accounting, inventory, interview scheduling, testing and so forth, IT made available menu driven applications for these tasks, even to the extent of advising the manager how many cookies needed to be baked each hour and what the projected sales for each hour were based on a series of questions the manager answered into th
system every morning.
Financially, based on the sales and inventory information, the computer system generated reports that were immediately made available to headquarters, and if stores were not meeting their objectives, IT-enabled a quick response to the situation.
Regional directors were able to monitor district managers who in turn managed six stores. IT made this possible by providing the regional directors with daily reports, who subsequently provided the district managers with reports. The directors also worked with controllers on a daily basis to discuss any accounting issues. Controllers also reviewed daily reports that monitored each store's sales, conditions and trends.
Quotas were set by district managers and were based on yearly trends. IT provided the reports that the district managers used to review historical trends and other factors to set the quota. In addition, controllers contacted field managers for explanation on inconsistencies in reports.
IT enabled feedback to be provided on a daily basis based on the reports generated. Controllers were also able to provide reports to Debbi within 24 hours of their review of reports, thereby shortening the time required to make decisions and increasing efficiency.
Rewards were given in the form of bonuses and were directly correlated with the information system because seniors measured subordinate performance by reviewing the sales reports generated by the information system. Bonuses were awarded monthly if store managers met their forecasts, and they were awarded additional bonuses if they exceeded their sales quota, which was all determined by the sales reports generated by the system.
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