Petrie’s Electronics Chapter 5 Case Questions
1. What do you think are the sources of the information Jim and his team collected? How do you think they collected all of that information?
Conducted interviews with key stakeholders inside the company, He had also worked with the marketing group to put together some focus groups made up of loyal customers, to get some ideas about what they would value in a customer loyalty program. Jim had also spent some time studying customer loyalty programs at other big retail chains and those in other industries as well, such as the airlines, known for their extensive customer loyalty programs.
2. If you were looking for alternative approaches for Petrie’s customer loyalty program, where would you look for information? Where would you start? How would you know when you were done?
An alternative approach would be by Business Process Reengineering. It is the search for, and implementation of, radical change in business processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in products and services. The first step would be to identify key business processes which are the structured set of measurable activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market.
3. Why shouldn’t Petrie’s staff build their own unique system in-house?
From the list of requirements, it was clear that Petrie’s staff should seek outside IT consulting to build their system. It would be too expensive and time consuming, not to mention, building a system like this in-house is an antiquated practice and they shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The IT staff would customize the system interface, and there would be lots of work for Sanjay’s staff in integrating the new system and its related components with Petrie’s existing systems, but the core of the system would have already been developed by someone else.

Petrie’s Electronics Chapter