Mrs. Fields’ Cookies is a case that was initially created in 1989 and revised in 1993. Even though it is nearly two decades old it contains a lot of educational value by providing look into an international company that has grown from just one small store to a huge organization with over 500 stores in 25 United States, and five countries on four continents. The company was created by Debbi Fields who opened her first store in Palo Alto, CA and grew her business with her husband Randy along her side. In this paper I will evaluate the development of the company as well as the early information systems that were used in the management of the organization.
As the time progressed and company grew the …show more content…
There is of course no question about it; however I personally believe that successful organization is built on the employees and this relationship that Debi had with them was one of the key success factor for the company. The Information Technology at Mrs. Fields’ is fairly sophisticated. It provides production recommendations to store managers, enables ongoing reporting system and provides ability for communication between employees and the management. IT system serves as a tool to everyone across the organization. One of the critical aspects is the report generation which provides the management with a large level of data. The process needs to be put in place though in order to better sift through the data at hand (due to a large level of available data). There is definitely a fairly visible hierarch across the organization starting with store employees, store managers, district store managers, regional directors, store controllers and the corporate management. At Mrs. Fields’ Cookies, one can notice, however, that the IT system plays a critical role in communication within the organization. There is a reporting structure in place and everyone has particular set of responsibilities, while the IT system is used to support the process. As mentioned in previous paragraphs, the company has a well established IT infrastructure (to be described more in detail in the next paragraph) which