Problem
Specialty Food is a local SME manufacturer niching in healthy local food products which they supply to the local supermarket and restaurant chains. It started as a family-owned business in 1982, founded by two brothers of the Goh family. The company has since grown into a large SME with a total headcount of more than 500 and factories in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. This is in no parts contributed by a small but rapidly growing segment of health-conscious consumers.
The Goh brothers has now retired and Specialty Food is managed by their off springs who are all university educated. This second-generation management of the established SME is adamant on further cementing the company's reputation as a sustainable specialty food manufacturer. To achieve these goals, it needs to establish a competitive advantage as a food manufacturer accredited internationally for environmental protection, social responsibility and governance, collectively known as ESG. This pursuit of ESG excellence is also underlined by the new management team's decision to rename and rebrand the company as ESG Specialty Food.
Pursuing ESG requires the company to put in place management systems to ensure environmental protection, social responsibility and good governance. Such management systems entail heavy use of data for analytics and decision making concerning environmental performance (such as energy efficiencies) and governance controls. ESG Specialty Food's digital savvy young management team favours prompt decision making and prefers access to fast, accurate and detailed information from whichever locations they are at around the world. A key IT architectural criterion is to minimise total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as on-premises IT infrastructure. The sizable data warehouse is outsourced to a reliable data centre. Such an architecture supports high transaction volumes and supports agile virtual teams operating in the region.
ESG Specialty Food's current management has partnered with major social media and platform providers to reach out to customers via all possible touchpoints, in order to focus on their needs and satisfaction. The company is confident of doing this as it has almost complete knowledge of their customers and their needs, although this knowledge is limited to the range of healthy local food products sold within their value chain
There is also a plan to incorporate an artificial intelligence (AI) based CRM system that will automate collection of data on customer requirements and also analyse consumer sentiments from their social media sites.
ESG Specialty Food's IT department is a modest 15 headcount strong. They manage diverse help desk activities; follow up with outsource partners; analyse needs together with business users; design, write, and test the software; identify, acquire, and install outside software packages to fill business needs; and correct system errors or enhance the system to respond to changing business and legal environments. To be data centric, ESG Specialty Food's relies on its CRM system vendor for data analytics tools. This is on top of other office and manufacturing application software that they purchase from various IT solution providers.
i. In order to learn the relationships between strategy and architecture, appraise ESG Specialty Food's strategic goals (in line also with its generic business strategy), business requirements and architectural requirements based on case facts.
ii. Determine the type of IT architecture configuration that is most suitable for ESG Specialty Food. Justify your answer using case facts.