Gladwell Engineering Case Study
Gladwell Engineering operates in the sale, lease, repair and
maintenance of copying and printing solutions for businesses.
The company supports the major copying and printing products
and solutions. Mr Simon Loh, the founder and chairman, started
the company in 1990. He is currently semi-retired and has turned
over the running of the company to his elder son, Jason Loh.
The Managing Director wanted some solutions to improve the service and
operational capability of the company. He has asked the Operations Admin and HR
Manager to provide some basic information about the company to solution providers
like you. The manager hastily created an organisational chart for this purpose.
The company was started by Mr Simon Loh who had excellent relationships with the
management of big name IT hardware companies like IBM, HP, Xerox and Canon.
Business boomed due to the good relationships established by the founder with
these vendors and key clients. Currently, the company is enjoying good sales growth
and healthy profits. However, competition is getting intense, and the excellent
relationships established with key people do not last due to staff movements in these
organisations.
While business is expanding, the ability of staff to handle the increased business has
dropped. Service level has declined and complaints about customer service has
increased. The ability of the service engineers to service client efficiently and
effectively has not kept up with the business growth. There is a lot of fire-fighting in
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the sales, operations and operations admin departments. Additionally, departments
frequently do not coordinate well with each other resulting in conflicts and
unhappiness.
Recently, the Business Development Manager has secured a major deal to provide
repair, service and maintenance system for the Ministry of Defence. The company
has also gotten some headways to do small scale hardware and system integration
for records management. However, the company has no Solution Architect and IT
consulting capabilities.
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