Foremostco, Inc. Case

Case : Foremostco, Inc. (A)

Foremostco Inc. was a family run business of 60 employees and they had grown really fast in 90s. They had become the largest source of imported starter plant material in North America. In the year 2000, they replaced their legacy IT system with the new one and faced issue of computer system breakdown.

Issue in consideration:

• Why did this project get into such trouble?

• What should be done to recover from the crisis described in the case?

Solution:

Foremostco faced the problem of computer system breakdown and they got into this panic situation. Primary reasons for this crisis could be:

• Not allocating sufficient time and cost to the application testing

• Lack of step by step activation of new IT system

• No business continuity and disaster recovery plan

As written above, they failed do to the proper testing of the application. In the rush of moving to the new system, they could not do full justice to the testing process.

Here, second point means, any organization should start using any new system in a step by step manner. First they should activate the new system and should keep the old system running. After a few days of performance monitoring, they can deactivate the old system.

Also, there seems to be no disaster recovery or business continuity plan in place which can help them to stand in the disaster. Because of the above three reasons, Foremostco failed to track their product and customer data when their computer system failed.

Now, I think they should activate their old system as soon as possible and start using that. By the meantime, they can ask engineers to look into