Mary Kay EC Systems Essay

Founded in 1962, bloody shame Kay (marykay.com) has about 1.8 million consultants selling its cosmetics and smell in 34 countries. In 2008, the ships company had about $2.4 billion in wholesale sales. As a company that has based its reputation on personal contacts in door-to-door visits and home gatherings, one might envisage that Mary Kay would not benefit from EC. Actually, the opposite is true. Currently, more than 95 portion of Mary Kays independent salespeople place orders via the internet.The ProblemThe cosmetics market is precise competitive, but it is growing rapidly, especially in developing countries. Mary Kay is exhausting to capitalize on this trend. The My Kay business model enables rapid branch into sore markets. By the early 2000s, consultants found that more and more customers wanted to depot online. With a long and global supply chain and the need to get away almost 2 million consultants, it was clear that automation was needed, but Mary Kays existing compu ter system was old and lacked web or e-commerce applications. Therefore, a major overhaul of the information systems was needed. Finally, it became clear that the emergence of genial computing might provide a golden opportunity for internet marketing by the company.The SolutionMary Kays IT department is straightaway split into three divisions e-commerce, supply chain, and back-office support. Because of pressure from the consultants, the restructuring focused on e-commerce.The companys goals and objectives were set based on industry best practices and this impart determine what, how, and when the company is operated, and these as well as apply to EC initiatives. Mary Kays EC solution included the creation of an electronic overhaul desk that supports consultants in 30 countries in a standardized way. Mary Kay also introduced a global electronic ordering system, called Atlas, that allows the consultants tocommunicate with company warehouses. An intelligent entropy repository th at dynamically maintains a logical model of the EC purlieu that can be accessed by Mary Kay IT staff.Mary Kay and its consultants are also making extensive use of social computing. The following are rough representative examples of how Mary Kay uses social computingThe company posts job scuttle announcements on several sites, including MySpace Jobs (jobs.myspace.com).Movies and videotapes are on hand(predicate) on YouTube (youtube.com) and on movies.go.com. some(prenominal) blogs are available, both for and against the company (e.g., marykayandrews.com/blog)Auctions and fixed price items are available for sale on eBay.Mary Kay provides a consultant locator on the Internet (marykay.com/locator).All of these developments are supported by an extensive ironware and software infrastructure, including a wireless remote management system at the 760,000 square-foot corporate headquarters, an extensive wide area network, and a large data center. Some of the EC systems are used enterpri se wide (e.g., service desk, ticketing system for consultants for events, andservice requests made by consultants). Others are functional (e.g., accounting, finance, marketing, and size up control). The company uses an intranet for internal communications as well as scores of other EC applications.In addition to providing better support to consultants, the EC initiatives produced other benefits, such as greater efficiency, reduced costs and downtime, and change service. In terms of human resources, it enabled the company to handle its rapid growth without a substantial increase in staffing. The changes also have allowed EC personnel to focus on strategic tasks. Mary Kay found that its engineers and adept people now have time to spend on reinvigorated innovations.