Neil and Joan a Missile and sister duo own a small dry cleaning business. NeJoWe Cleaners! provides several services to its customers: dry cleaning of clothes and household linen, laundry, ironing, repair work and clothing alterations. They currently have 5 locations across the capital city, with the sixth location being that of the main office were most of the cleaning and laundry is carried out.

NeJo has been in business for about ten years and believe that personal contact with customers, operational efficiency, fast and quality work has given them the edge in building the business. A key feature of their customer service is soliciting feedback from customers about their service quality, this they were able to do in person on their daily deliveries as one or the other travelled around to each location on a daily basis. These trips would also give them the opportunity to physically check on what was happening in each location and have formal and informal talks with the staff.

While business is growing, a number of issues are emerging for the young entrepreneurs:

There is a city-wide water shortage and water lock-off therefore, the laundry side of their business is growing as clients now find it difficult to wash all laundry at home;

Paper work has grown exponentially with the growth in business; while the locations are connected by email, all processes are still paper based; the accounting system in particular is a nightmare when taxes are to be paid, involving many hours and sleepless nights, and

Deliveries to each shop are made three times a day, because of road works and an influx of more affordable cars, time spent on the road is now eating into the time available to complete main office activities; consequently delivery times are unpredictable and customer delight has been sliding downwards at 1 % per month for the last 5 months, this has been attributed to a 5% increase in completed jobs being delivered to the wrong location and the inability to maintain the 96% same day delivery target.

NeJoWeCleaners! has been in operations for 10 years. Neil has a first degree in accounting and IT and Joan one in management with minors in human resource and operations management. As the business has grown, they have each transitioned themselves from managers of the outlets and now manage the business from the head office.

Each outlet employs five persons, most of who have been with the NeJo from the beginning. Neil and Joan are thankful that they have a low level of absenteeism, low staff turnover and few accidents, but are concerned that the issues, if not managed will lead to de-motivated staff and further slide in business goodwill and growth. The business supports 37 persons, composed of customer service representatives, dressmakers/tailors, drivers and persons who operate the specialized laundry equipment as well as complete general laundry and ironing.

All is not bad news, they now have the opportunity to buy out and rebrand a competitor’s location. Neil see the opportunity to control performance across the various outlets with the use of the customer and job handling IT solution that would come with the purchase. He feels that eliminating the crushing paperwork along with budgetary controls will bring the problems under control. Joan is of the opinion that all they have to do is to employ more drivers, change the delivery times, and abandon their same day service, she believes that introducing computers will adversely affect the staff productivity and retention.

Neil and Joan has asked your group to give them some ideas about designing a control system that they could use for NeJo WE Cleaners!

Prepare a proposal that covers the following:

Identification and analysis of two control problems that you consider major, and an evaluate of the two opposing solutions proposed by Neil and Joan;

Proposal of solutions, of each of the two control problems identified, to Neil and Joan based on the above analysis; to include, types of feedback and concurrent controls that they could use and the benefits these will bring to the business.

Neil has made the decision to buy off-the-shelf software that will connect all locations and manage customers, jobs and accounting data. Design an Action Plan that Neil and Joan can use to ensure that their employees remain motivated based on the planned introduction of the IT solution. He plans to have the system running in 9 months.