Exclusive Tours Case Study: Business Strategy, Technology, and Ethics

The assignment content discusses the concept of ethical decision-making and analysis in the context of a business scenario. It highlights the role of Robinson, the owner, Harry, the manager, and James, the worker, in a software development project. The primary responsibility for the product failure lies with Robinson, while Harry is secondarily responsible for choosing to deliver the product on time despite compromising quality. Additionally, the content discusses the value chain functions of Classy Movies Entertainment company, which specializes in creating new stories and searching out books that can be converted into family movies.

Case Study

Exclusive Tours Case
Exclusive Tours Case
1. Based on a careful reading of the case answer the following questions and then complete the
tables below.
a. What is the strategic business driver of Exclusive Tours (i.e. operational excellence,
customer intimacy, product/service innovation) and why did you make this choice?
The strategic business driver for Exclusive Tours can be product and service innovation
because they are right now lacking at providing differentiated services to different aged
customers as well as they require customer intimacy excellence to attain comparative
advantage in their services by healthy interaction with their customers knowing about their
demands and requirements (Morash, E. A., & Clinton, S. R., 1998).
b.
Current Business Activities/Operations Violated Information Processing
Principle
1) Business Operation A: The company
carried during business operation A this that
and that in satisfying customers…
- Description of an information processing
principle violated by the business operation
A
Exclusive has a few experience centers
(EXPC) to great malls in metro areas
The principle of limited capacity- since the
amount of information that can be
processed by the tour company is limited.
Lot of time wasted in reading the traveling
brochures of rivals and no time allotted to
create their unique services
The two-way flow of information principle
is violated here.
Current Business Activities/Operations Violated Hardware Deployment Principles
1) Business Operation J: The company
carried during business operation J this that
and that in satisfying customers…
- Description of a hardware deployment
principle violated by business operation J
1

. They have to share the special hardware at
International tours with others to make the
special booking. The single user operating
system and hardware from MidrangeX are
used which works slower as they are
upgraded.
To deploy compatible hardware
components across the functional areas of
the organization which is throughout
similar rather than having any
heterogeneity and not using Midrange
hardware which is slower.
Current Business Activities/Operations Violated Software Deployment Principles
1) Business Operation M: The company
carried during business operation M this
that and that in satisfying customers…
- Description of a software deployment
principle violated by the business operation
There are two workers in each reservation
and sales department. They each have
computers in their offices and have single-
user software from World Global
reservations. The computers use Windows
operating systems software on an IBM
compatible software. This means that they
have to exchange customer data by email.
Shared databases are more efficient than
the database for single-user software
(Oakland, J. S., 2014).
In the marketing section, the records of
customers are kept by consultants on a piece
of paper, and they take a lot of time to go
through their written notes to give the
answer to the queries relating to their
services.
To avoid this haphazardness, a software
product should be deployed to store all
such reporting, rules, operational activities
making it possible for a customer as well
the market consultant to provide
information conveniently.
Changes to Current Business Process Enabling Application Software
- Description of changes to existing
business activity
- Business application software type and
module
- Business application software type and
module
Social media websites for communicating
2

Exclusive holidays can advertise
themselves and about their upcoming
vacations and discounts
about new upcoming vacations and discounts
Exclusive Holidays can start over their
online portals providing transparent and all
access of information to the customers.
Letting the customers know about the
existence of such portal and provide them
with user guidelines via their mail.
ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING AND ETHICAL ANALYSIS
Worker Manager Owner
Use of
Power
James has no authority he
has been asked to work on
the software
Harry has used his power
on James by forcing him
to work on the software
and making delivery on
time even if that would
lead to serious reliability
issues.
Robinson used his
power of ownership to
make Harry understand
how important the
Pharma project is for the
company and thus
ordered to get the
ordered completed on
time.
Risks &
Reliability
James faced the risk that
he would lose the job if he
did not work on the
project. So he worked on
the project as per
manager’s instructions.
Harry faced the risk of
delivering the software
by time. Hence he
undertook the option of
creating the software in
two weeks and thus faced
stability and reliability
issues.
Robinson faced the risk
that his company would
lose Pharma as a
customer. Hence, he
pressurized on winning
rather than providing
quality services.

Who is primarily responsible for the product failure?
Primary responsibility for the failure of the product holds with Robinson, the owner. To not
lose Pharma as a customer and in hope to maintain its competitive image. He recommended
the Harry to focus on winning rather than making quality-conforming software (de Waal, A.
et. al., 2016).
4.
Who is secondarily responsible for the product failure?
Secondary responsibility for the product failure lies with Harry, the manager. He has two
option for recreating the software -One would have taken four weeks to program with stable
3

quality and better features and the other solution idea would have taken two weeks to create
but facing relative stability and reliability issues. I order to deliver the product on time he
chose the second option and altered the scope of testing to run the software for reliability test
up to 150 hours rather than pre-determined 500 hours of testing which though resulted in
timely delivery but rendered low quality services and ruined the image of the company (Ford,
R. C., & Richardson, W. D., 2013).
____________________________________________________________________
CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT OF THE DESIGNED WORLD WITH TECHNOLOGY
5. You are the CEO of a new startup Classy Movies Entertainment company. Your
company specializes in creating new stories and searching out books that can be
converted into family movies. The value chain of your company is…
Type/Name Value Chain Function to
be Covered
Specific Social Media
Activities to Be Done
Social Media
Platform Name
Facebook Look for original storyline
and checking for its movie
viability and give selected
stories to specialists who
convert them into movie
manuscripts
Invite people who can share
their original stories through
advertisements and
motivational videos (Fritz,
T., Huang, E. M., Murphy,
G. C., & Zimmermann, T.,
2014).
Twitter Connecting to Hollywood
studios to sell some of the
movie manuscripts
Follow the famous authors
and studio owners’ accounts
of Hollywood to seek them
to buy the manuscripts and
help in funding the movies.
Youtube Marketing and portraying
upcoming productions
Youtube is the best source to
increase the number of
subscribers as well as a
number of shares (Zacharias,
N., Nijssen, E. J., & Stock,
R., 2016).
4

REFERENCE
de Waal, A., de Waal, A., van der Heijden, B., & van der Heijden, B. (2016). Increasing customer
loyalty and customer intimacy by improving the behavior of employees. Journal of Strategy and
Management, 9(4), 492-510.
Ford, R. C., & Richardson, W. D. (2013). Ethical decision making: A review of the empirical
literature. In Citation classics from the Journal of Business Ethics (pp. 19-44). Springer Netherlands.
Fritz, T., Huang, E. M., Murphy, G. C., & Zimmermann, T. (2014, April). Persuasive technology in
the real world: a study of long-term use of activity sensing devices for fitness. In Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 487-496). ACM.
Morash, E. A., & Clinton, S. R. (1998). Supply chain integration: customer value through
collaborative closeness versus operational excellence. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice,
6(4), 104-120.
Oakland, J. S. (2014). Total quality management and operational excellence: text with cases.
Routledge.
Zacharias, N., Nijssen, E. J., & Stock, R. (2016). Effective configurations of value creation and
capture capabilities.
5