Rising to the Lockdown Challenge: A Case Analysis

Task 1: Define transaction data and provide examples

Rising to the Lockdown Challenge 

Note: this is a fictitious case loosely based on some real events 

During New Zealand’s COVID “lockdown” in 2020, New Zealanders had to spend an unprecedented amount of time living and working from home. Living at home in a “bubble” involved many challenges, notably the need for kiwis to provide their own meals 24X7.  It was no longer possible to eat out or to order takeaways, previously taken-for-granted activities. Supermarkets remained open but various barriers made this an unpleasant experience: there were long queues due to social distancing rules, some items were unavailable, and there were concerns about being exposed to the virus. With fast food off the menu, the focus of many turned to freshly made food. Media reports highlighted a particularly strong interest in baking. However, it was impossible to buy domestic quantities of flour due to a shortage of 1kg and 2kg packaging. In some cases, supermarkets ran out of bread. 

Lima and Jack, owners of Wellington’s Fresh Rise Bakery, saw this as an exciting business opportunity. The government’s lockdown rules required bakeries to close their stores to foot traffic, but there was a provision that allowed food producers to offer a new service – contactless delivery of essential food items, which included baked goods. This provided an opportunity for Fresh Rise to pivot. The bakery had recently started a web- based home ordering and delivery service. Lima and Jack believed that they build on this to rapidly scale up production and delivery, keeping home-based customers happy in the short-term, while building brand awareness that could help increase their market share longer-term. However, scaling up while moving to contactless delivery would be a challenge in more ways than one. It would require many changes to how the company operated and to the data and information that it gathered and managed. 

Fresh Rise was an artisan bakery, producing 25 different kinds of bread and cakes daily.  In addition to selling directly to in-shop customers, Fresh Rise delivered daily supplies to around 40 business customers who accounted for 50% of sales. The bakery had also recently started taking twice-weekly orders from individual customers who lived in the Wellington suburbs. These home orders were made via a web-based ordering system, with customers booking and paying for delivery of their bread of choice four days in advance. The four-day window helped Fresh Rise with planning production and delivery for their team of twelve, including five bakers.  The online system also provided a way to build up a more comprehensive customer database. 

Lima and Jack hoped that they could keep their full product line during the lockdown but realised that there may be disruptions to the supply of ingredients and other challenges. In addition, they wanted to explore sourcing popular spreads and toppings such as honey, peanut butter and avocados to provide more options for their customers. They would also need to reconfigure staffing to allow larger physical distances between workers – the bakers, packers and workers who delivered the orders needed to be at least 5 metres apart.  There will need to be records keeping track of staffing, cleaning frequency and delivery. 

It was also impossible to know what level of demand to expect. However, the web provider had a tiered plan that supported the addition of an analytics layer that could help Fresh Rise track data such as revenue, conversion rate, and cart abandonment data. 

While Lima and Jack are great bakers and entrepreneurial business owners, they abandoned their INFO 101 studies to run the business, so have asked you for some advice relating to their information management needs.

Some guidelines: 

• This analysis should have 3 sections; 1 for each task (you may use subheadings if you wish).
• No executive summary, introduction or conclusion needed.
• If you have used any external references, in-text citations must be used, and a reference list must be included on a separate page. All referencing must be in APA format and neither the reference list nor in-text citations will be included in your word count.
• We expect this analysis to be no more than 1000 words. 

Please note you will also be assessed on the quality of your writing and grammar (10 marks).

This assignment will be marked through Turnitin, a plagiarism-checking tool, so do not include any section of the brief or the questions themselves within your submission.

Task 1 (25 marks)

Fresh Rise needs to collect and manage various kinds of transaction data in order to support the scaling up of online sales and making contactless deliveries during COVID. 

Define transaction data

Identify and describe two examples of transactional data that are relevant to Fresh Rise’s goal of scaling up and making contactless deliveries. (Make sure your examples are clearly linked to the case details.)  

Task 2 (25 marks) 

Explain how Lima and Jack could use data from their website (an online sales/ordering system) to support a specific business function (for example, manufacturing, human resources, accounting or marketing). 

• Choose one business function and explain how data from the website could be used to support it.  Explain your answer with an example from the case.  
• Identify two specific examples of IS-generated reports that would be useful for this purpose. (Briefly explain what might the reports show & why these would be useful in the case of Fresh Choice.) 

Task 3 (40 marks) 

Lima and Jack are keen to add extra product lines to their online offerings, such as peanut butter from local suppliers.  

• What information management challenges does this (I.e. an extension of online offerings) present? (Please give two examples, linked to the case)
• For one of the challenges you identified above, propose a solution.