Healthlite Yogurt

Company overview:

Healthlite Yogurt Company offers yogurt and other dairy products. The company is headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut and comprised of 20 sales regions and a 12 person marketing group. The company has 20 data entry employees, 600 sales representatives and 20 sales managers. Sales representatives and managers are divided into 30 sales representatives and 1 sales manager per region servicing over 48,000 accounts with an average of 80 accounts per sales representative. The company receives over 500,000 order tickets per week by fax and mail orders combined. Its products are sold through processing plants located in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, and California and distributed to local warehouses.

Current Business Processes:

Healthlite Yogurt Company operates through a mainframe computer system. The mainframe computer is located at the corporate facility in Danbury, Connecticut. At headquarters master files are maintained and order verification or rejection are determined using the mainframe computer.

The current process for Healthlite Yogurt Company requires sales managers to inform sales representatives of promotional campaigns and pricing discounts through mail or phone. Sales representatives then pass the information to their clients and write a hard-copy ticket for each individual order by either mailing or faxing the order request. Once the order request is received at headquarters it is opened, sorted and entered into a terminal by a data entry employee. The orders are entered into the mainframe and once verified it remains in queue till evening.

Every evening the mainframe sends the verified orders to the processing plants stating the total amount of yogurt and type as well as other relevant demands per order. The processing center then receives the order over its minicomputer in the morning and produces the amount and type of yogurt as well as other requested related products. When the order is completed it is then shipped from the processing site to warehouses located within the sales regions.

Current Problems Associated with Business Processes:

Healthlite Yogurt Company has grown in business and reached a point where its