This case study is about IMT Custom Machine Company, INC.

(CMC) which is
subsidiary company of the International Machine and Tool-USA (IMT-USA). IMT passed
through number of mergers and acquisitions throughout its history of operations. The production
of the company was very high in mid-1970s, but then in the next twenty years it went down and
by the 1995, it was very low and as a result some drastic changes were required, especially in the
organization of the information system (IS) across the company. The company had two main
plants which were under the control of the June: one was in Chicago, Illinois and other was at
Fort Wayne, Indiana. The company produced very sophisticated and state of the art custom
machines and it had very professional engineers, designers and software developers, but the
problem was that there was no coordination among them and they were split into two groups
engineering system (ES) and management information system (MIS). Similarly, there was lack
of connectivity between the information system of Chicago and mainframe at the Fort Wayne
which was affecting the performance of the company. The company was still using local area
network (LAN) in different departments instead of wide area network (WAN) which is more
sophisticated and share information among different departments more robustly. Similarly, there
was no backup in case of computer system failure and people use paper systems and scheduling
information and test details were done by hand instead of computer. If anyone had problem he
was just using local software made by the company engineers instead of using more
sophisticated and efficient software. In short, there were several problems in the company which
were contributing to the decrease production of the machines and immediate attention is required
to solve these problems.
June Page was working in the CMCI and she had 18 years of versatile experience in the
custom machine making companies. In 1999, she was appointed as the Vice President of the
CMCI. The two production facilities one in Chicago, IL and another in Fort Wayne, Indiana were
under her control and she was also responsible for the third facility which provides spare parts to
the main production facilities. Her main role was to uplift the production of the company and
create an organizational environment that allows all IMT-USAs employees to work more
coherently and uniformly. In order to develop strong company culture for the CMCI a clear
vision and strategy is required to foresee the real issues going on in the company especially, with
the information system of the company. Though June Page had no experience of the information
system, but she has ability to find out the problems and to take drastic steps to implement
changes that should be required for the prosperity of the company. Page decided to find out what
are potential problems in the company. So, she asked senior engineer Charles Browning to point
out the problems and potential solutions for those problems. Charles Browning was staff
engineer in the company and he had extensive computing background. He did six week
investigation, and then come up with the four plausible solutions for the ongoing computing
problems in the company.
The first solution was moving towards more centralization and removing existing work
stations such as Sun and IBM. This change would free up the mainframe, but company would
require spending more money to buy new software which would be used by number of users at
same time and funds are also required to relocate CAD workstations from one place to other and

if this system failed it would definitely cost a lot of money to the company. The second solution
is to improve workstation computing. It would help to spread out information to all work
stations, and it would be connected to one common network, but the problem associated with this
change was that current staff had no knowledge of distributed computing and new staff would be
required to deal with this system and new applications might be required to deal with the new
system. The third solution provided by the Charlie was introduction of the Linux based system
which is connected to data hosting company instead of the centralized mainframe system. This
system is portable and could be used on many different machines and company had no need to
invest money to buy new hardware but instead would only pay to the off-site data company. The
main drawback of this change would be that the company will place sensitive data in the hands
of other company. The fourth recommendation is wait and watch policy. In this policy company
would wait and see what development would be happened in the future and specific system
changes will applied only if required in the future. On the other hand, company is already using
wait and watch policy and it could hurt the business in the long run if they will not evolve its
information system with time.
I think there are pros and cons associated with each solution provided by the Charlie and
it would not be easy to implement any change immediately because it could cause disruption in
the normal functioning of the plant. Therefore, I would suggest implementing combination of
solutions provided by him and those changes can be implemented gradually and cautiously that
normal production of the plant would not effect during implementation of those changes. The
company should decrease its dependence on the mainframe because it is not fulfilling the
technological requirements of the company therefore it should consider to move towards
computed workstation environment which would be more integrated and spread out information
to all work station. Similarly, along with this Linux system should be used. Even though in this
system off site data company would be involved, but this is only solution to make information
technology system of the company more efficient and productive. Linux system is not expensive
to install and rebooting is not required quite often in Linux system. The Linux system is quite
easy and fast to install (Haas, n.d.). Similarly, WAN should be used instead LAN to connect the
workstation. A WAN is an advanced version of a LAN, developed to increase efficiency of
communication between people of different geographical regions. Internet is an example of
WAN while LAN is computer present in any office. The cost of the WAN is quite low even
though it is much faster than the LAN (Walton, n.d.). Company should hire professional people
for the improvement of the information system in the company. These are the suggestions which
could be used by the company to improve its information system and company should not adapt
wait and watch policy because companys production is already going down and its time to take
bold steps which would be beneficial for the company in the future. It would help company to
cope with the challenges posed by evolution in the information system and to compete with the
other competitors in the market.

References
Haas, J. (n.d.). Linux, the Ultimate Unix. Retrieved June13, 2014, from
[Link]
Walton, A. (n.d.). The Advantages of a WAN Over a LAN. Retrieved June 12, 2014, from
[Link]